| 5. "Not only by the warmth, And soothing sunshine of delightful things, Do minds grow up and flourish."—Akenside. |
No more than flowers grow up and flourish best, when reared in a hot-house. Those flowers may have more beauty, but where is the strength which the free blowing blossom of the wilderness alone possesses? The corolla is delicate, its petals each a separate loveliness: but where is the noble stalk sustaining many and more voluminous, though less gaudy blossoms, which rears its enduring head aloft, living when the other is dead—fragrant when the other is withered upon the dewless earth around its drooping stem? Adversity has been the parent of master minds. Homer and Milton, and Shakspeare, and Burns—these were no hot-house plants in Nature's garden: they were born in obscurity; their upward growth was watered with the dew-like tears of adversity; they were reared in the great wilderness of the world, amid its storms, its tempests, and its fitful gleams of sunshine: and so "do minds grow up and flourish."
6. "Renewed friendships are to be conducted with greater nicety than such as have never been broken."—Rochefoucault.
Yes: just as one should handle a porcelain vase, once fractured and repaired, more carefully than before it was injured.
7. "I do not subscribe to the notion that poets are born," said Herbert.—Private Life.
Horace thought otherwise. I never agreed with the Venusian poet. Walter Scott was not a born poet: he was made by the scenes around him from his birth. Byron was not a native poet: his early "poetry" (?) proves the fact abundantly. His only true poetry was the result of circumstances. His first good poem was made by an article in the Edinburgh Review. His next was made by an unhappy marriage, and all the rest that deserved the name have an origin of the kind. Would Burns the cit have ever turned out what Burns the Ayrshire ploughman proved, think ye? And was Pope born a poet? No more than Napoleon was born Emperor of the French!
J. F. O.