familiar and favorite character, or tale, no matter how much invention it displays, meets with little favor from a modern public. But the still older and well known materials of nature, if hitherto unemployed, are always new when woven into art. From inexhaustible treasures of reality the poet is expected continually to draw previously unappropriated stores.

In oratory, the use of an old fact or argument for a new purpose, a new turn given to a well known train of thought, or a new combination and a new point made from old data, are correctly set down to the credit of invention.

The painter and sculptor, though employing a more difficult language, and more limited in range of topics, are subjected to demands scarcely inferior to those made upon the poet.

In brief, however, the principal mine of invention is the artist's own spirit. If some great or beautiful native thought, which has had its birth and growth within him, be the genius of his work, and shape for itself and to its own proportions the imagery drawn from nature, the result, when complete, will be confessed the truest offspring of inventive power. The finding out of materials, and of methods of applying them to such a purpose, is the utmost of human invention and no imitation, or description, of the most beautiful object in nature, if devoid of this spiritual interest, can be of more than secondary value.

The attempts sometimes made to secure the honors of invention by extravagances and unprecedented conceits, only serve to demonstrate the folly of their authors. The freshest work of the greatest master is made up of elements accessible to all. Life and novelty must be conferred upon them by the idea they subserve.

18

CHAPTER VII.

OF GENIUS AND TALENT.

IF men differ in the tone, the turn, or bearing of their intellectual faculties, not less do they differ in the degrees of their strength and activity. While some have hardly force of mind enough to make their individuality distinguishable, others impress the features of their own character, not only upon all they do, but to some degree upon all with whom they are connected, or even upon the whole age in which they live; and some few have left such a mark upon the world as time seems unable to erase. The peculiar aptitude, or bearing, of the individual mind, has long ago been marked in common language. When we say of a person, that he has a genius for mathematics, or languages, or that he has a talent for mechanics, or a tact for certain manipulations, we distinctly recognize the existence of a peculiar turn of the mind. When used merely for the purpose of stating this fact, these three words are almost synonimous. Genius and talent are more common than tact, and of the two, perhaps genius is the more frequently employed. But

there are also distinctive senses in which they are more correctly used, as marking different degrees of strength, clearness, subtilty of the individual character, as well as different intellectual powers.

In its distinctive and appropriate sense, the term genius is applied to mind only when under the direction of its individual tendencies, and when those are so strong or clear as to concentrate all its powers upon the production of new, or at least independent results; and that whether manifested in the regions of art or science. Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, were no less men of genius, than Michael Angelo, Raphael, Shakspeare, and Scott, although the work they performed and the means they employed were different. The patient thought, the refined calculations, which unfolded the laws of the material universe, are slow in reaching their end, but are no less truly the productions of new and beautiful results, than that more rapid intuition which penetrates the mysteries of the human spirit, to embody them in creations which rise before the observer like living things. Genius, however, must agreeably coöperate with imagination, and from the most fascinating deductions of argument, though directed by itself, turns with an affectionate joy to those pursuits in which its flight is unconstrained. Those ideas which come unsought, whose light rises upon the mind not like the slow progress of dawn, but as the midday sun when he bursts through an interposing barrier of clouds, it delights to revel in. Yet it rests not in idle

revery. No power of the human mind is so abundant in labor. The unchanging lover of the beautiful, it dwells with peculiar affection upon the charms of resemblance and design, in accordance with which its creations are most rapidly achieved, while its own existence is an irresistible impulse to productive activity. If taste is the faculty of criticism, genius is that of original invention. The word is Latin, and in that language signified the guardian spirit of the individual man, the divinity which came into existence at his birth, watched over and directed all the changes of his life, and at his death was again merged in the all-pervading Deity from whom it sprang. There is a beautiful relation existing between this meaning and that which we have derived from it. Absolute creation is the work of God alone; but that faculty in man, which, in the use of preëxisting material, seems to approach creative power, we designate by a divine name. Genius can effect new ends only by recombining old material; but being itself original, its own freshness is breathed into its offspring, giving them the hue of new creations, diffusing over them the light of its own peculiar dowry from the hand of God.

By talent in its distinctive meaning, we understand the power of acquiring and adroitly disposing of the materials of human knowledge, and products of invention in their already existing forms, without the infusion of any new enlivening spirit. It looks no farther than the attainment of certain practical ends, which