Genius

But to find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of days with feelings as fresh, as if they the sprang forth at his own fiat—this characterizes the minds that feel 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 has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguishes genius from talent.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)