Truth hath many sides like a
diamond with innumerable facets, each one alike brilliant and
piercing. Your information respecting your friend Christian has not a
little interested me, and made me desirous of knowing him.
_Kosmon._ And I, no less than Sophon, am delighted to hear that we
shall both see and taste your friend.
_Sophon._ Kalon, by what you just now said, you would seem to think a
dearth of original thought in the world, at any time, was an evil:
perhaps it is not so; nay, perhaps, it is a good! Is not an
interregnum of genius necessary somewhere? A great genius, sun-like,
compels lesser suns to gravitate with and to him; and this is
subversive of originality. Age is as visible in thought as it is in
man. Death is indispensably requisite for a _new_ life. Genius is
like a tree, sheltering and affording support to numberless creepers
and climbers, which latter die and live many times before their
protecting tree does; flourishing even whilst that decays, and thus,
lending to it a greenness not its own; but no new life can come out
of that expiring tree; it must die: and it is not until it is dead,
and fallen, and _rotted into compost_, that another tree can grow
there; and many years will elapse before the new birth can increase
and occupy the room the previous one occupied, and flourish anew with
a greenness all its own.
Pages:
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288