The wing of genius was not bound to the earth by the cold
and conventional rules of criticism, but was permitted to take
its flight far and wide over the broad expanse of creation.
But with science it was otherwise. No genius could suffice for
the creation of facts, - hardly for their detection. They were
to be gathered in by painful industry; to be collected from
careful observation and experiment. Genius, indeed, might
arrange and combine these facts into new forms, and elicit from
their combinations new and important inferences; and in this
process might almost rival in originality the creations of the
poet and the artist. But if the processes of science are
necessarily slow, they are sure. There is no retrograde movement
in her domain. Arts may fade, the Muse become dumb, a moral
lethargy may lock up the faculties of a nation, the nation itself
may pass away and leave only the memory of its existence, but the
stores of science it has garnered up will endure for ever. As
other nations come upon the stage, and new forms of civilization
arise, the monuments of art and of imagination, productions of an
older time, will lie as an obstacle in the path of improvement.
They cannot be built upon; they occupy the ground which the new
aspirant for immortality would cover. The whole work is to be
gone over again, and other forms of beauty - whether higher or
lower in the scale of merit, but unlike the past - must arise to
take a place by their side.
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