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    though seldom seen , harbingers of superior powers , the fruits of which time only cian ripen to practical manifestation and lofty maturity . The most pure and perfect state of human existence , —the most ethereal in mind , being fresh from the creative hand ; the most eixtnusiastic and benevolent of heart , being yet uncontaminated by the outer world and all its bitter disappointments ; the sweetest ,

    and yet the most pathetic , were it only from the extreme sense of beauty , —is the early youth of genius . Alone in the acuteness of its general sensibility , —unsympathized with in its peculiar views of nature ; its heart without utterance , and its intellect a mine penetrated by the warmth of the dawning sun , but unopened by its meridian beams , —the child of genius wanders forth into the fields and woods , an embodied imagination ; an elemental being yearning for operation , but knowing not its mission . A powerful

    destiny heaves for development in its bosom ; it feels the prophetic waves surging to and fro : but all is indistinct and vast , caverned , spell-bound , aimless , and rife with sighs . It has little retrospection , and that little of no importance ; its heart and soul are in the future , a glorified dream . Memory , with all its melancholy pleasures and countless pains , is for the old , and chiefly for the prematurely old ; but youth is a vision of the islands of the blest ; it tells its own fairy tale to itself , and is at once the hero

    and inventor . It revels in the radiance of years to come , nor ever dreams that the little daisy on the lawn , so smilingly beheld , or so tenderly gathered from its green bed , shall make tne whole heart ache with all the past when it meets the eye some years hence . If this be more or less the case with youth in general , it is so in a pre-eminent degree with the youth of genius . At this early period of the life of such a being , impressions of moral and physical beauty exist in ecstatic sensation , rather than in sentiment ; a

    practical feeling and instinct , not a theory or rule of ri ght . Conscious only of its ever-working sensibility and dim aspirations , boundless as dim , —utterly unconscious of its own latent powers or means of realizing its feelings , —the child of genius yearns with a deep sense of the divinit y of imperishable creation , with hopes that sweep high over the dull earth and all its revolving graves ;

    and lost in beatific abstraction , it has a positive foretaste of immortality . Such we may affirm , —if the reader will add that intensity of comprehension which pierces beneath the deepest roots of the heart , and to which all words are but the earth-like signs , the finger-marks of mortality pointing to the profound elements of human nature , —such was tne earl y youth of William Hazlitt . But a more distinct condition of mind , —less affecting berhaps from its approach towards self-reliance and manly equalitjr , yet still touching from tjie very youthfuiness of its power and evident unconsciousness of the practically incorrigible vices and perverse

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    680 Disquisition o / i the Genius , Writings ,

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1835, page 630, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2650/page/2/