Thus Homer, aged beggar, to whose eyes the sun denied its light, but whose divine soul inspiration illuminated, was able to endow ungrateful Greece, in return for his miserable bread, with the majesty of Olympus, with the glory of the heroes and with the immortality of those eternal songs which survive the decay of the agonies and the ruin of empires.
Thus, Dante, proscribed by his countrymen, has been able to cause to spring from the depths of his hatred and his grief the omnipotent ray which was to illuminate the conscience of his time and to be the admiration of future ages.
Thus, that other blind man, who, as Byron says, made the name Miltonic synonym of sublime and who died as he had lived the sworn enemy of tyrants, in the cell to which ingratitude consigned him, improvised for himself a throne, and from its dominated creation saw prostrate themselves at his feet not only his country, but the world.
Thus Cervantes, the poor cripple, disdained by persons of distinction and persecuted by fortune created, in the midst of the agony of misery, the sole treasure which can not be wrested from old Spain, more precious truly than the ephemeral grandeur of kings and the imbecile pride of nobles.
Thus lastly, Camoens, soldier also like Cervantes, and like him unfortunate, left in his deathbed in a foreign hospital, as a great legacy to his country, his Lusiadas, the most beautiful monument of Portuguese glory.
Thus many others, dead through the hemlock of contemporary disdain, and compensated with tardy apotheosis, have not found obstacles in poverty, in envy and in defeat; and abandoning with thought the narrow spheres of the world, have gone to grave their names upon the heaven of poetry.
But such is the privilege of genius and of genius only. The talents which cannot aspire to such height, nor feel themselves endowed with force divine, are eclipsed in the test, the same test which causes him, who is predestined for sublimity, to shine forth more resplendent and more grand.
And in Mexico the genius enwraps himself yet in the shades of the invisible, or does not belong to the new generation.
Those of us who penetrate, with timidity and difficulty, into the sacred enclosure of poetry and literature, belong to the crowd of mortals; and scarcely may we aspire to the character of second rate workers in the family of those who think.
Thus for us are heavy those chains which for geniuses would be but spider webs; discouragement crushes us at times—discouragement, that poisoned draught, whose vase of vile clay is shattered before the glance of genius, accustomed to sip the nectar of the immortals in the myrrhine cup of faith.