Literary Character of Men of Genius Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions

rsuits analogous.-The nature of their genius is similar in their distinct

iscipline; and thus it has happened that the same habits and feelings, and the same fortunes,

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hares the peri

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r, and at length precipitately descend into the iron. In the history of painting, after the splendid epoch of Raphael, Titian, and Correggio, we meet with pleasure the Oarra

el poetare sente chi sia Andrea (del Sarto) nel dipingere;" he who feels what TIBULLUS is in poetry, feels what ANDREA is in painting. MICHAEL ANGELO, from his profound conception of the terrible and the difficult in art, was called its DANTE; from the Italian poet the Italian sculptor derived the grandeur of his ideas; and indeed the visions of the bard had deeply nourished the artist's imagination; for once he had poured about the margins of his own copy their ethereal inventions, in the rapid

ised."[B] This error of genius, perhaps first caught from Richardson's bewildering pages, was strengthened by the extravagant principle adopted by Darwin, who, to exalt his solitary talent of descriptive poetry, asserted that "the essence of poetry was picture." The philosophical critic will find no difficulty in assigning to each, sister-art her distinct province; and it is only a pleasing delirium, in the enthusiasm of artists,

art; and in the "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 398, w

poet which the painter does not equal? What is there of mechanical which he does not surpass? The advantage which poetry possesses over painting in continued narration and successive impression, cannot

f Laoco?n was the common end where the sculptor and the poet were to meet; and we may observe that the artists in marble and in verse skilfully adapted their variations to their respective art: the one having to prefer the nude, rejected the veiling fillet from the forehead, that he might not conceal its deep expression, and the drapery of the sacrificial robe, that he might display the hu

s useless to reply to this question; for some important truths must be instinctively felt, perhaps the fundamental ones in the arts." A truly imaginative artist, whose enthusiasm was never absent when he meditated on the art he loved, BARRY, thus vehemently broke forth: "Go home from the academy, light up your lamps, and exercise yourselves in the creative part of your ar

above others the privilege of communicating their own feelings; and every life of a man of genius, composed by himself, presents us with the experimental philosophy of the mind. By living with their brothers, and contemplating th

its colour, taste, smell, form, and other properties, will find the des

Gesner, who was not only an author and a poet, but an artist who