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Larger of bone and sinew it may be, but the wings are wanting. Talent
sticks fast to earth, and its most perfect works have still one foot of
clay. Genius claims kindred with the very workings of Nature herself, so
that a sunset shall seem like a quotation from Dante, and if Shakespeare
be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his verses shall but
seem nobler for the sublime criticism of ocean. Talent may make friends
for itself, but only genius can give to its creations the divine power
of winning love and veneration. Enthusiasm cannot cling to what itself
is unenthusiastic, nor will he ever have disciples who has not himself
impulsive zeal enough to be a disciple. Great wits are allied to madness
only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away by their demon,
While talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the
pommel of his sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual
world is ever rent asunder that it may perceive the ministers of good
and evil who throng continually around it. No man of mere talent ever
flung his inkstand at the devil.
When we say that Mr. Poe had genius, we do not mean to say that he has
produced evidence of the highest. But to say that he possesses it at
all is to say that he needs only zeal, industry, and a reverence for the
trust reposed in him, to achieve the proudest triumphs and the greenest
laurels. If we may believe the Longinuses; and Aristotles of our
newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order to
render a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness
of attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is,
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