In the deepest night of trouble and sorrow God gives us so much to be thankful for that we need never cease our singing. With all our wisdom and foresight we can take a lesson in gladness and gratitude from the happy bird that sings all night, as if the day were not long enough to tell its joy.
What! Did Sir W[alter] R[aleigh] believe that a male and female ounce (and, if so, why not two tigers and lions, etc?) would have produced, in a course of generations, a cat, or a cat a lion? This is Darwinizing with a vengeance.
As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius - the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.
The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief, In word, or sigh, or tear.
Men of humor are always in some degree men of genius; wits are rarely so, although a man of genius may, amongst other gifts, possess wit, as Shakespeare.
Either we have an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts,--the first and the wisest of beasts, it may be, but still true beasts. We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,--just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts, and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it must be the possession of the soul within us that makes the difference.