intoxicating, seductive liquor, from which he cannot take away his lips.

It is the liquor of our life. In measure, or form, or tone, he applies
himself to the very breasts of Nature, and draws through these exteriors
a motherly milk which was her blood and hastens to be his own. If the
young cub holds fast to the teat, be sure the stream flows and his veins
swell. Matter is the dry rind of this succulent, nutritious universe:
prick it on any side, and you draw the same juice. Varieties of
endowment are only so many pitchers dipped in one stream. Poet, painter,
musician, mathematician, the gift is an accident of organization, the
result is admission to that by which all things are, and by partaking
which we become what we must be.

Of this experience there can be no adequate report. It is as though one
should attempt to go up in a balloon above the atmosphere and bring down
the ether in his hands. There is a spring on every door in Nature to
close it behind the returning footsteps of her lover, so that he can
lead no man freely into the chamber where she gave him love; it is only
by the confidence, fervency, and reverence of the initiate that we learn
in what presence he has been. Genius is great, but no product of genius
is more than a shadow which points to this sun behind the sun as its
substance, and the power of our inspired men has been merely manifested,
not rightly employed. Genius has availed only to authenticate itself as
the normal activity of man, not yet to do the work of the world.

Sense is a tangle of contradiction. The boy throws wood on water and it
floats; then he throws in his new knife and it sinks. How was he to know
that the same force will lift a stick and swallow a knife? He throws a
feather after his knife, and away it swims on the wind. That is another
brook, then, in which the feather is a stick and the stick a stone. Not