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.
Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events, just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.
Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.
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.
Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, ''Where is it?''
I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness as from a conscious defect of voluntary power; as foolhardiness is not seldom the disguise of conscious timidity.