In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is
but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and
wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and
mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the
wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the
wild--the mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way
above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as
unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower
discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the
East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like
the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of
knowledge itself--and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of
the race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild
strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature,
reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood, her
wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature,
but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when
her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became
extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing.
The poet today, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science,
and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over
Homer.