To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.
Not the poem which we have read , but that to which we return , with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .
Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud. We in ourselves rejoice! And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, all melodies the echoes of that voice, all colours a suffusion from that light.
Seldom can philosophic genius be more usefully employed than in thus rescuing admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.
For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization science, law; in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading he way.
How many of our virtues originate in the fear of Death & that while we flatter ourselves that we are melting in Christian Sensibility over the sorrows of our human Brethren and Sisteren, we are in fact, tho' perhaps unconsciously, moved at the prospect of our own End for who sincerely pities Sea-sickness, Toothache, or a fit of the Gout in a lusty Good-liver of 50?