tory.

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate by the word
Genius, we observe the same balance of two elements as in intellect
receptive. The constructive intellect produces thoughts, sentences,
poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the
marriage of thought with nature. To genius must always go two gifts, the
thought and the publication. The first is revelation, always a
miracle, which no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever
familiarize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupid with
wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of thought
now for the first time bursting into the universe, a child of the old
eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasurable greatness. It seems,
for the time, to inherit all that has yet existed and to dictate to
the unborn. It affects every thought of man and goes to fashion every
institution. But to make it available it needs a vehicle or art by which
it is conveyed to men. To be communicable it must become picture or
sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The most wonderful
inspirations die with their subject if he has no hand to paint them to
the senses. The ray of light passes invisible through space and only
when it falls on an object is it seen. When the spiritual energy is
directed on something outward, then it is a thought. The relation
between it and you first makes you, the value of you, apparent to me.
The rich inventive genius of the painter must be smothered and lost
for want of the power of drawing, and in our happy hours we should be
inexhaustible poets if once we could break through the silence into
adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to primary truth, so all
have some art or power of communication in their head, but only in the
artist does it descend into the hand. There is an inequality, whose laws
we do not yet know, between two men and between two moments of the same
man, in respect to this faculty. In common hours we have the same facts
as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for their portraits;
they are not detached, but lie in a web. The thought of genius is
spontaneous; but the power of picture or expression, in the most
enriched and flowing nature, implies a mixture of will, a certain
control over the spontaneous states, without which no production is
possible. It is a conversion of all nature into the rhetoric of thought,
under the eye of judgment,