Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/279



But when this breath of inspiration from the ideal world touches upon a great man of letters, a poet like Milton or Sophocles, it wakens his most dangerous and divine faculty; it fills him with the creative Apollonian madness, with a clear luminous dream, in which he seems to himself to behold a law above the law of the State, above the custom of society, beyond the practice of the individual man. His highest function it is, a truly religious function, to declare the new law. For this, he is a member of the great society; for this, he is a free man, acknowledging no sovereign but God: namely, that when the call comes, when new light breaks, when his pulses throb with urgent moral life, he may rise from the slumbers of his old opinions, and, girding up his loins, lead the faithful