The recreations of Christopher North Author:John Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HIGHLAND SNOW STORM. What do you mean by original genius ? By that fine line in the Pleasures of Hope— " To muse on Nature with a poet's eye ?" Why—geni... more »us—one kind of it at least—is transfusion of self into all outward things. The genius that does that —naturally, but novelly—is original; and now you know the meaning of one kind of original genius. Have we, then, Christopher North, that gift ? Have you ? Yea, both of Us. Our spirits animate the insensate earth, till she speaks, sings, smiles, laughs, weeps, sighs, groans, goes mad, and dies. Nothing easier, though perhaps it is wicked, than for original genius like ours, or yours, to drive the earth to distraction. We wave our wizard hand thus—and lo ! list! she is insane. How she howls to heaven, and how the maddened heaven howls back her frenzy ! Two dreadful maniacs raging apart, but in communion, in one vast bedlam! The drift-snow spins before the hurricane, hissing like a nest of serpentslet loose to torment the air. What fierce flakes ! furies ! as if all the wasps that ever stung had been revivified, and were now careering part and parcel of the tempest. We are in a Highland Hut in the midst of mountains. But no land is to be seen any more than if we were in the middle of the sea. Yet a wan glare shows that the snow-storm is strangely shadowed by superincumbent cliffs; and though you cannot see, you hear the mountains. Rendings are going on, frequent, over your head —and all around the blind wilderness—the thunderous tumblings down of avalanches, mixed with the meanings, shriekings, and yellings of caves, as if spirits there were angry with the snow-drift choking up the fissures and chasms in the cliffs. Is that the creaking and groaning, and rocking and tossing of old trees, afraid of being uprooted and flung into...« less