And such only are men of genius as accomplish this divine utterance. The voice itself may be strong or tiny,—that of a seraph, or that of a song-sparrow; the range and power of combination may be Beethoven's, or only such as are found in the hum of bees; but in this genuineness, this depth of ancestry and purity of growth, this unmistakable issue under the patronage of Nature, there is a test of genius that cannot vary. He is not inimitable who imitates. He that speaks only what he has learned speaks what the world will not long or greatly desire to learn from him. "Shakspeare," said Dryden, not having the fear of Locke before his eyes, "was naturally learned"; but whoever is quite destitute of natural learning will never achieve winged words by dint and travail of other erudition. If his soul have not been to school before coming to his body, it is late in life for him to qualify himself for a teacher of mankind. Words that are cups to contain the last essences of a sincere life bear elixirs of life for as many lips as shall touch their brim; they refresh all generations, nor by any quaffing of generations are they to be drained.
To this ease it may be owing that poets and artists are often so ill judges of their own success. Their happiest performance is too nearly of the same color with their permanent consciousness to be seen in relief: work less sincere—that is, more related and bound to some partial state or particular mood—would stand out more to the eye of the doer. To this error he will be less exposed who learns—as most assuredly every artist should—to estimate his work, not as it seems to him striking, but as it echoes to his ear the earliest murmurs of his childhood, and reclaims for the heart its wandered memories. Perhaps it is common for one's happiest thoughts, in the moment of their apparition in words, to affect him with a gentle surprise and sense of newness; but soon afterwards they may probably come to touch him, on the contrary, with a vague sense of reminiscence, as if his mother had sung them by his cradle, or somewhere under the rosy east of life he had heard them from others. A statement of our own which seems to us very new and striking is probably partial, is in some degree foreign to our hearts; that which one, being the soul he is, could not do otherwise than say is probably what he was created for the purpose of saying, and will be found his most significant and living word. Yet just in proportion as one's speech is a pure and simple efflux of his spirit, just in proportion as its utterance lies in the order and inevitable procedure of his life, he will be liable to undervalue it. Who feels that the universe is greatly enriched by his heart-beats?—that it is much that he breathes, sleeps, walks? But the breaths of supreme genius are thoughts, and the imaginations that people its day-world are more familiar to it than the common dreams of sleepers to them, and the travel of its meditations is daily and customary; insomuch that the very thought of all others which one was born to utter he may forget to mention, as presuming it to be no news. Indeed, if a man of fertile soul be misled into the luckless search after peculiar and surprising thoughts, there are many chances that be will be betrayed into this oversight of his proper errand. As Sir Martin Frobisher, according to Fuller, brought home from America a cargo of precious stones which after examination were thrown out to mend roads with, so he leaves untouched his divine knowledges, and comes sailing into port full-freighted with conceits.
May not the above considerations go far to explain that indifference, otherwise so astonishing, with which Shakspeare cast his work from him? It was his heart that wrote; but does the heart look with wonder and admiration on the crimson of its own currents?
* * * * *
AT PORT ROYAL. 1861.
The tent-lights glimmer on the land,
The ship-lights on the sea;
The night-wind smooths with drifting sand
Our track on lone Tybee.
At last our grating keels outslide,
Our good boats forward swing;
And while we ride the land-locked tide,
Our negroes row and sing.
For dear the bondman holds his gifts
Of music and of song:
The gold that kindly Nature sifts
Among his sands of wrong;
The power to make his toiling days
And poor home-comforts please;
The quaint relief of mirth that plays
With sorrow's minor keys.
Another glow than sunset's fire
Has filled the West with light,
Where field and garner, barn and byre
Are blazing through the night.