The true Democrat., 1855-02-28
GENIUs.-ITs-sPIRrT AND ITS MISSION.
BY J. D. BELL

Sometimes there isa practical mind, or might, born with a man, and the world sees and suf- fers it's simple, truthful, heroic originality, and with a superstitious surprise and wonderment calls it genius.
 Its possessor is spoken of while living, as a man of quick pulse, creative thought, energetic action, and indomitable will. And when he is dead, there is written not merely on paper and marble but on the great world, in deep and in delible lines, the eternal memorial,
 ' Dead oak, thou livest Thy smitten hands,
 The thunder of thy brow.
 Speak with strange tongues in many lands"
 The spirit of this beautifully original nature is self-nourished and constant longing for more comprehensive and grander forms of being It is deep and restless hankerlng after expres- sion-after the expression of self and thought by words and deeds Hence, it is creative be- cause 1t must create new and peculiar channels through which to personate its own Ideal. It's mission is to find out the dwelllng-places of great and good things and to robe everything in a halo of rich and glorious light. It makes mute things vocal; dead things living; old things new. Were it not for genius, nature would be too dull and monotonOus. The trees would get to be vegetable status, did we not see ln them houses and cities, and collins, and ships. We respect the drop of water, because the ge- nius has taught us that steam and lightning live in it; and by the same light we see the oak in the acorn, the pyramid in the rock, the tempest in the breeze, and read in the fosslized fern and fucoid, the epitaphs of the old ages of the te-Adamic earth. Indeed, may we not say that everything we love has been once conse- crated by the baptism and benediction of some gifted presence? We love the painted lands klox, hal lowed by the earnest touches of the soul; and we cling with sort of noble superstition even to the posthumous tatters of the great dead, be- cause we fancy some precious remnants ot their genius still finger. Genius is the sun, whose shining makes the mute memories of Art and Nature sing In every old scence, and toll and sorrow, there is always something young and beautiful, and new, bursting and blossoming out path in which we were treading yesterday, is new to-day because to-day we are shedding around it some new, and perhaps, nobler exis- tence. Genius changes and transforms every thing for the better. Even misfortune grows beautiful in the spell of its witch-light. We love Homerlan Milton all the better for their being blind and Socrates all the more for his being poor And in this delightful ennobling of things lies the chief power of creative mind. Genius is more an improver than an inventor. The great men of history are great, principally in their capacity to communicate and concen- trate an ever-noble, spiritual, jubilant self, or soul, upon some common object of nature, or some old, forsaken fashion or feeling of man kind. The telescope, the art of printing, and the steam engine are but the separate combina- tions of such simple things as glass; water, etc., with the living soul of man. Great men are al- ways building little universes- -kosmoi-around them, through which to express themselves, as God through his great universe, expresses him. self. 1so a'"
 The reformation was but the daguerreotype, so to speak, of Luther's great mind; and may we not say that the Paradise Lost" the Might