To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
ATTRIBUTION:
George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans] (1819–1880), British novelist, editor. Will Ladislaw, in Middlemarch, bk. 2, ch. 22 (1871-1872).
