To carry on the feelings of childhood into the
powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with
the appearances which everyday for perhaps forty years had rendered
familiar;
'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman;'--
this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which
distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of
genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent
familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling
concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant
accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not
a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new
feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual
pleasure
'To snow that falls upon a river,
A moment white--then gone for ever!'"
_Biog. Lit_. vol. i, p. 85.--ED.]
* * * * *
I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action
of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or
Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very
palatable to his clients.
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