outgrown many a Magnus Apollo of childhood; his beauty is no longer
beautiful, his gold is tinsel, we can dig better for ourselves.
Therefore we can draw no line that will stand between poets and
pretenders. That is fire which fires me to-day; to-morrow the same
influence is frost. The standard is my temperature, a sliding scale. My
neighbors are raised to ecstasy by what seems a rattle of pots and pans;
but I remember when heaven opened to me also in Scheffer, Byron,
Bellini. The judge places himself in his judgment,--declares only what
is now above him, what below. If I find Milton prosaic beside
Swedenborg, perhaps I do Milton no wrong; perhaps no man in the company
so admires his impetuous grandeur; but now the impersonality of the
Swede may meet my need more nearly, with his mysteries of
correspondence, spiritual law, enduring Nature, and supremacy of Love.
Discrimination is worth so much, because there are no great gaps between
man and man, between mind and mind: there is no virtuous, no vicious, no
poet, no unpoet, and only dulness lumps one with angels, another with
dogs. There are infinite kinds and infinite degrees of intelligence;
there is genius in every sort and every stage of adulteration, overlaid
by this, by that, by the other grave mistake; and we cannot afford to be
inhospitable to the feeblest protest against our condition and
ourselves.

We pass all but the few great masters, and they are only before us on
the road. Culture is the opening of spontaneous or liberal activity, and
hangs all on the pivotal perception that everything, experience, effort,
element, history, tradition, art, science, is another opening to the
same centre, and that our life. When the pupil is roused, enchanted,
fired, his redemption from sense is begun; he is delivered to the great
God, if it were only in a crystal or a caterpillar; he will never again
be the clod he was. The years are cruel and cold, want and appetite