Samuel Taylor Coleridge...on genius
To find no contradiction in the union of the old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all His works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat, characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar...this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents. And, therefore, it is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects, as to awaken in the middle of others a kindred felling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant acomplishment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence.
- Biographia Literaria, 1817