Than the eye or the heart e’er possessed.
His knowledge is heaven, wherever the place;
His beauty, my quietest rest.
[WHAT GENIUS IS.]
By JAMES KERR. M. A.
We will now consider what genius is, and, more particularly, whether it is an inborn or an acquired power.
On this much debated question there are, so to speak, two schools of thought, diametrically opposed to one another, and each pushing its views to an extreme, as if there were no middle way in which the truth may be found.
On the one hand, genius is held to be a kind of inspiration, which accomplishes its object without training or effort. No culture is needed; no special education whatever. Shakspere warbled “his native wood-notes wild” spontaneously. The songs of Burns are the outpourings of untaught genius; and no culture or education could have improved them in the slightest degree. They are like the song of the lark, free and spontaneous. But all this, we know, is an ideal dream. Shakspere, besides reading the volume of human nature which lay open before him, and which he made all his own, read many books, and took much pains with his writings. And as for Burns, he received a training of no ordinary kind. To say nothing of the volume of human nature spread out before him, from his youth upward, and which, like Shakspere, he read with penetrating glance, he perused with critical care the literary compositions of others, by which his mind was disciplined and his taste refined.