Then we open paths, renew our society, enlarge our work, make elbow-room
and head-room enough in the world. Criticism is the shadow of the mind.
Insight is not sadness, but invigoration,--is no sob or spasm, but
clearness in the eye and calmness in the breast. We misjudge it from
partial examples: the light of day is confidence, yet sudden bursts of
light distress and blind. The poet is rapt, and follows thought; he
leaves his meat, and by some transubstantiation feeds on the wind; he no
longer sees the pillars of Hercules on a sixpence; he is mad for the
hour, if a majority shall say what is madness. Meanwhile his field is
unploughed; and if he falls from this ecstasy, look to see an harassed,
embittered man. The birds sing as they pick up the corn, but wisdom is
not so quickly convertible into meal, and if he cannot feed always on
it, let him never seek the Muse. Our poor half-genius vibrates miserably
between truth and the dinner-pot, comes back from his apocalypse, and
cries for admiration, gold-lace, hair-powder, and wine. That is no
apocalypse from which a man returns to whine and beg. Burns complains of
Scotland and poverty, Byron of England and respectability, and they are
both so far paupers unfed at home. Wordsworth finds London a wilderness,
and goes more than content to good company in lonely Cumberland, to eat
a crust and drink water with the gods. Socrates is barefooted. He has
one want so pressing that he can have no other want, and has set his
lips to a cup which hides his bare feet from his eyes: with a single
garment for winter and summer, he draws the universe around him a
garment for the mind.

If the first flashes of perception dazzle, they are rays of daylight to
one emerging from the cave of sense. The eye becomes wonted to truth,
and that is now the least of his convictions which yesterday struck Paul
from his horse, and rebuked him as fire from the sky. Truth is breath,