s, where the latter sees aggregates.

Corresponding with these two kinds of genius there are two classes of
artistic productions. When the critical genius writes a poem or a
novel, he constructs his plot and his characters in conformity to
some prearranged theory, or with a view to illustrate some favourite
doctrine. When he paints a picture, he first thinks how certain
persons would look under certain given circumstances, and paints them
accordingly. When he writes a piece of music, he first decides that
this phrase expresses joy, and that phrase disappointment, and the other
phrase disgust, and he composes accordingly. We therefore say ordinarily
that he does not create, but only constructs and combines. It is far
different with the artistic genius, who, without stopping to think,
sees the picture and hears the symphony with the eyes and ears of
imagination, and paints and plays merely what he has seen and heard.
When Dante, in imagination, arrived at the lowest circle of hell, where
traitors like Judas and Brutus are punished, he came upon a terrible
frozen lake, which, he says,--

"Ever makes me shudder at the sight of frozen pools."

I have always considered this line a marvellous instance of the
intensity of Dante's imagination. It shows, too, how Dante composed
his poem. He did not take counsel of himself and say: "Go to, let us
describe the traitors frozen up to their necks in a dismal lake, for
that will be most terrible." But the picture of the lake, in all its
iciness, with the haggard faces staring out from its glassy crust, came
unbidden before his mind with such intense reality that, for the rest
of his life, he could not look at a frozen pool without a shudder of
horror. He described it exactly as he saw it; and his description makes
us shudder who read it after all the centuries that have intervened.
So Michael Angelo, a kindred genius, did not keep cutting and chipping
away, thinking how Moses ought to look, and what sort of a nose he
ought to have, and in what position his head might best rest upon his
shoulders. But, he looked at the rectangular block of Carrara marble,
and beholding Moses grand and lifelike within it, knocked away the
environing stone, that others also might see the mighty figure. And so
Beethoven, an artist of the same colossal order, wrote out for us those
mysterious harmonies which his ear had for the first time heard; and
which, in his mournful old age, it heard none the l