GENIUS AND OBSTACLES.
Rigorously speaking, it can not be said that popular neglect can be a chain which holds genius in the dust of impotence.
No: the genius, powerful and lofty eagle, knows how to break with his talons the vulgar bonds with which the pettiness of the world may attempt to shackle thought.
Thus Homer, aged beggar, to whose eyes the sun denied its light, but whose divine soul inspiration illuminated, was able to endow ungrateful Greece, in return for his miserable bread, with the majesty of Olympus, with the glory of the heroes and with the immortality of those eternal songs which survive the decay of the agonies and the ruin of empires.
Thus, Dante, proscribed by his countrymen, has been able to cause to spring from the depths of his hatred and his grief the omnipotent ray which was to illuminate the conscience of his time and to be the admiration of future ages.
Thus, that other blind man, who, as Byron says, made the name Miltonic synonym of sublime and who died as he had lived the sworn enemy of tyrants, in the cell to which ingratitude consigned him, improvised for himself a throne, and from its dominated creation saw prostrate themselves at his feet not only his country, but the world.
Thus Cervantes, the poor cripple, disdained by persons of distinction and persecuted by fortune created, in the midst of the agony of misery, the sole treasure which can not be wrested from old Spain, more precious truly than the ephemeral grandeur of kings and the imbecile pride of nobles.
Thus lastly, Camoens, soldier also like Cervantes, and like him unfortunate, left in his deathbed in a foreign hospital, as a great legacy to