26 WHENCE GENIUS SPRINGS. 



and which I would strongly urge upon your attention, 

 is simply this : Do not hastily relinquish a train of 

 thought, suggested by a fresh class of circumstances 

 more or less interesting, even though the prospect of 

 utility be very remote. If the poet spake truly, that 

 " our thoughts are heard in heaven," may not a philoso- 

 pher remark with equal truth, that our noblest thoughts 

 are suggested in heaven ; and that all genius is a species 

 of inspiration ? Among the ancients, when nature was 

 not, as too frequently happens among us, concealed 

 under a thick veil of elucidation, this was unhesitatingly 

 admitted ; as by Plato in his Phcedrus, and even by 

 Longinus, the most reserved of ancient critics. They 

 distinguished accurately the enthusiasm or inspiration 

 of genius, from the perturbed suggestions of the 

 OeoArjTrroi and Phrenetici ; but sought the occasion of 

 both ab extra, and not in the imagination itself. In the 

 latter case, they regarded the bark as driven of necessity ', 

 wanting cable and anchor to hold her ; in the former, 

 as sailing from choice, because the gale is from a 

 favourable quarter, and the voyage desirable. Under 

 another metaphor they viewed the imagination of the 

 poet, and in its kind and degree, that of every man of 

 genius, as a field in which the Author of nature produces 

 a set of objects which existed not before ; as a region 

 in which new images and combinations arise, like new 

 plants, under auspicious circumstances of culture or 

 climate, according to the settled laws of the Creator. 

 Notwithstanding, however, the exhaustless fertility of 

 the field, we are placed in it as labourers, amid circum- 

 stances which show that though nature is liberal in 

 supplying her gifts, she seems so parsimonious in their 

 distribution, that none but the vigilant obtain them ; 



