THE CHOSEN BREAST.

The veteran poet was, perhaps, schooled by the vicissitudes of his own
poetical life, and those of some of his brothers.

Metaphors are but imperfect illustrations in metaphysical inquiries:
usually they include too little or take in too much. Yet fanciful
analogies are not willingly abandoned. The iconologists describe Genius as
a winged child with a flame above its head; the wings and the flame
express more than some metaphysical conclusions. Let me substitute
for "the white paper" of Locke, which served the philosopher in his
description of the operations of the senses on the mind, a less artificial
substance. In the soils of the earth we may discover that variety of
primary qualities which we believe to exist in human minds. The botanist
and the geologist always find the nature of the strata indicative of its
productions; the meagre light herbage announces the poverty of the soil it
covers, while the luxuriant growth of plants betrays the richness of the
matrix in which the roots are fixed. It is scarcely reasoning by analogy
to apply this operating principle of nature to the faculties of men.

But while the origin and nature of that faculty which we understand by the
term Genius remain still wrapt up in its mysterious bud, may we not trace
its history in its votaries? If Nature overshadow with her wings her first
causes, still the effects lie open before us, and experience and
observation will often deduce from consciousness what we cannot from
demonstration. If Nature, in some of her great operations, has kept back
her last secrets; if Newton, even in the result of his reasonings, has
religiously abstained from penetrating into her occult connexions, is it
nothing to be her historian, although we cannot be her legislator?