"In Literature
it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for
tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in "Hamlet" and "Iliad,"
in all the
Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild
duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild-the mallard-thought,
which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something
as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower
discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light
which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance
shatters the temple of knowledge itself,-and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of
the race, which pales before the light of common day...."
