THE WORD GENIUS.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1582, 25 March 1887, Page 4

THE WORD GENIUS.

Dryden was one of the earliest English writers to use the word genius in the sense of that which is 1 the gift of Nature," and which " must be born, and never can be taught." Its most frequent use by the Latins was in the sense of a tutelar spirit, but sometimes, as in Juvenal and Martial, it denoted the fire of individual greatness. The idea of a divine admonisher was more or less current with the Latins as with the Greeks. They named this spirit the " inborn," and Genius thus came to mean the inspiration rather than tbe inspirer. agreeably to the feeling that the soil is itself divine and its ovrn monitor. In modern times the wcrJ, v» ry slightly inflected, has been more widely received into European languaf.es to express a meaning common to all, than almost any other Latin derivative; it is not only found in all Latin tongues — Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French—but has been adopted by tbe Germans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians and other peoples, who, like ourselves, have no indigenous word that conveys precisely the same idea. A universal word means a universal thought. Prophets, mystics, all direct inspirationists, still cherish the germinal belief, so rapturously manifest in Jacob Bobme's avowal : " I say before God that I do not myself know how it happens to me hat, without having the impelling will, I do not know what I should write. For when I write the Spirit dictates to me." But genius in the derivative sense is equally recognised, the world over, as a gift; something not quite attainable by labour, however promotive that may be of its bravest exercise; and a gift, of types as various as are the different persons endowed with it.—E. C. Stedman, in New Princeton Review.