The man of genius places things in a new light. This trivial phrase better expresses the appropriate effects of genius than Pope's celebrated distich—
"What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest."
It has been thought distinctly, but only possessed, as it were, unpacked and unsorted. The poet not only displays what, though often seen in its unfolded mass, had never been opened out, but he likewise adds something, namely, light and relations. Who has not seen a rose, or sprig of jasmine or myrtle? But behold those same flowers in a posy or flower-pot, painted by a man of genius, or assorted by the hand of a woman of fine taste and instinctive sense of beauty!
LOVE
To find our happiness incomplete without the happiness of some other given person or persons is the definition of affection in general, and applies equally to friendship, to the parental and to the conjugal relations. But what is love? Love as it may subsist between two persons of different senses? This—and what more than this? The mutual dependence of their happiness, each on that of the other, each being at once cause and effect. You, therefore, I—I, therefore you. The sense of this reciprocity of well-being, is that which first stamps and legitimates the name of happiness in all the other advantages and favourable accidents of nature, or fortune, without which they would change their essence and become like the curse of Tantalus, insulting remembrances of misery, of that most unquiet of all miseries, means of happiness blasted and transformed by incompleteness, nay, by the loss of the sole organ through which we could enjoy them.
Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and what the eye is to the light, and the light to the eye, that interchangeably is the lover to the beloved. "O best beloved! who lovest me the best!" In strictest propriety of application might he thus address her, if only she with equal truth could echo the same sense in the same feeling. "Light of mine eye! by which alone I not only see all I see, but which makes up more than half the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, still, like the rising sun in the morning, like the moon at night, remainest thyself and for thyself, the dearest, fairest form of all the thousand forms that derive from thee all their visibility, and borrow from thy presence their chiefest beauty!"
COTTLE'S "FREE VERSION OF THE PSALMS"
Diamond + oxygen = charcoal. Even so on the fire-spark of his zeal did Cottle place the King-David diamonds, and caused to pass over them the oxygenous blast of his own inspiration, and lo! the diamond becomes a bit of charcoal.