I often say to young writers & speakers, that their best masters are their faultfinding brothers & sisters at home, who will not spare them, but be sure to pick & cavil, & tell the odious truth. It is smooth medioc­rity, weary elegance, surface finish of our voluminous stock-writers, or respectable artists, which easy times & a dull public call out, without any salient genius, with an indigence of all grand design, of all direct power. A hundred statesmen, historians, painters, & small poets, are thus made: but Burns, & Carlyle, & Bettine, and Michel Angelo, & Thoreau were pupils in a rougher school.

          —Ralph Waldo Emerson

©G. Tod Slone, 2008, The American Dissident www.theamericandissident.org.  All rights revert to the authors.