it that these men's thoughts radiate from them as acts, endowed not only
with an illuminating, but a penetrating and animating power? The answer
to this is a statement of the genesis, not merely of genius, but of
every form of intellectual manhood; for such thoughts do not leap, _à
la_ Minerva, full-grown from the head, but are struck off in those
moments when the whole nature of the thinker is alive and aglow with an
inspiration kindled long before in remote recesses of consciousness from
one spark of immortal fire, and unweariedly burning, burning, burning,
until it lit up the whole inert mass of surrounding mind in flame.

To show, indeed, how little there is of the _extempore_, the hap-hazard,
the hit-or-miss, in the character of creative thought, and how
completely the gladdest inspiration is earned, let us glance at the
psychological history of one of those imperial ideas which measure the
power, test the quality, and convey the life, of the minds that conceive
them. The progress of such an idea is from film to form. It has its
origin in an atmosphere of feeling; for the first vital movement of the
mind is emotional, and is expressed in a dim tendency, a feeble feeling
after the object, or the class of objects, related to the peculiar
constitution and latent affinities of its individual being. This
tendency gradually condenses and deepens into a sentiment, pervading the
man with a love of those objects,--by a sweet compulsion ordering his
energies in their direction,--and by slow degrees investing them,
through a process of imagination, with the attribute of beauty, and,
through a process of reason, investing the purpose with which he pursues
them with the attribute of intelligence. The object dilates as the mind
assimilates and the nature moves, so that every step in this advance
from mere emotion to vivid insight is a building up of the faculties
which each onward movement evokes and exercises,--sentiment,
imagination, reason increasing their power and enlarging their scope