Would you have purple or yellow
eyes, because the accustomed colors have been so often repeated? Black,
blue, brown, gray, forever! May the angels in heaven have no other!
Forever, too, and equally, the perpetual loves, thoughts, and melodies
of men! Let them come out of their own mystical, ineffable haunts,--let
them, that is, be _real_,--and we ask no more.
The question of originality is, therefore, simply one of vitality. Does
the fruit really grow on the tree? does it indeed come by vital
process?--little more than this does it concern us to know. Truths
become cold and commonplace, not by any number of rekindlings in men's
bosoms, but by out-of-door reflections without inward kindling. Saying
is the royal son of Seeing; but there is many a pretender to the
throne; and when these supposititious people usurp, age after age, the
honors that are not theirs, the throne and government are disgraced.
Truisms are corpses of truths; and statements are to be found in every
stage of approach to this final condition. Every time there is an
impotency or unreality in their enunciation, they are borne a step
nearer the sepulchre. If the smirking politician, who wishes to delude
me into voting for him, bid me his bland "Good-morning," not only does
he draw a film of eclipse over the sun, and cast a shadow on city and
field, but he throws over the salutation itself a more permanent
shadow; and were the words never to reach us save from such lips, they
would, in no long time, become terms of insult or of malediction.
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