it is hard to tell; but this is certain, that it puts peas
unboiled into the shoes of every pilgrim who really gets up to its
Olivet.

Genius has all manner of dead dreams and sorrowful lost loves for its
scallop-shells; and the palm that it carries is the bundle of rods
wherewith fools have beaten it for calling them blind.

Genius has eyes so clear that it sees straight down into the hearts of
others through all their veils of sophistry and simulation; but its own
heart is pierced often to the quick for shame of what it reads there.

It has such long and faithful remembrance of other worlds and other
lives which most minds have forgotten, that beside the beauty of those
memories all things of earth seem poor and valueless.

Men call this imagination or idealism; the name does not matter much;
whether it be desire or remembrance, it comes to the same issue; so that
genius, going ever beyond the thing it sees in infinite longing for some
higher greatness which it has either lost or otherwise cannot reach,
finds the art, and the humanity, and the creations, and the affections
which seem to others so exquisite most imperfect and scarcely to be
endured.

The heaven of Phaedrus is the world which haunts Genius--where there
shall not be women but Woman, not friends but Friendship, not poems but
Poetry; everything in its uttermost wholeness and perfection; so that
there shall be no possibility of regret nor any place for desire.

For in this present world there is only one thing which can content it,
and that thing is music; because music has nothing to do with earth, but
sighs always for the lands beyond the sun.

And yet all this while genius, though sick at heart, and alone, and
finding little in man or in woman, in human art or in human nature, that
can equal what it remembers--or, as men choose to say, it imagines--is
half a child too, always: for something of the eternal light which
streams from the throne of God is always shed about it, though sadly
dimmed and broken by the clouds and vapours that men call their
atmosphere.

Half a child always, taking a delight in the frolic of the kids, the
dancing of the daffodils, the playtime of the children, the romp of the
winds with the waters, the loves of the birds in the blossoms. Half a
child always, but always with tears lying close to its laughter, and
always with desires that are death in its dreams.

No; you have not genius, cara mia. Say your grazie at the n