the obscurest way, toward intellectual and artistic expression.

Now just so far as by any man's speech we feel ourselves brought into
direct relationship with this ever-issuing fact, so far the impressions
of originality are produced. That all his words were in the dictionary
before he used them,--that all his thoughts, under some form of
intimation, were in literature before he arrived at them,--matters not;
it is the verity, the vital process, the depth of relationship, which
concerns us.

Nay, in one sense, the older his truth, the _more_ do the effects
of originality lie open to him. The simple, central, imperial elements
of human consciousness are first in order of expression, and continue
forever to be first in order of power and suggestion. The great
purposes, the great thoughts and melodies issue always from these. This
is the quarry which every masterly thinker or poet must work. Homer is
Homer because he is so simply true alike to earth and sky,--to the
perpetual experience and perpetual imagination of mankind. Had he gone
working around the edges, following the occasional _detours_ and
slips of consciousness, there would have been no "Iliad" or "Odyssey"
for mankind to love and for Pope to spoil. The great poets tell us
nothing new. They remind us. They bear speech deep into our being, and
to the heart of our heart lend a tongue. They have words that
correspond to facts in all men and women. But they are not newsmongers.

Yesterday, I read in a prose translation of the "Odyssey" the exquisite
idyl of Nausicaa and her Maids, and the discovery of himself by
Ulysses. Perhaps the picture came out more clearly than ever before; at
any rate, it filled my whole day with delight, and to-day I seem to
have heard some sweetest good tidings, as if word had come from an old