Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/185

 of iron ore which runs through everything that Emerson says or writes, because it is the life of his life. In his lecture on self-reliance, he says:— “To believe your own thought, to believe that which is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment. The highest merit which we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton, is that which every man recognises as the voice of his own soul, is that they set books and traditions at nought, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous impression with good-humoured inflexibility, then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say, with masterly good sense, precisely what we have thought and felt the whole time, and we shall be forced to take our own opinion from another.

“Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place which the Divine Providence has found for you; the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves, childlike, to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men,