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"eccentricities of genius" is a common expression, it may possibly suggest the inference that where there is most genius there is usually most originality of thought, consequently, originality (or eccentricity) of expression, manner, and action? Thus may we not arrive at the potential deduction that original (or eccentric) people are usually persons endowed with uncommon capacities, if not gifted with positive genius?

For ourselves, we have the bad taste to avow that contact with thoroughly original spirits is to us refreshing and enlivening in the highest degree. How their presence wakens, stirs up a sluggish, dead-alive coterie! How they infuse new ideas, new pulses, new vitality into lower, duller, more torpid organizations! How they reinvigorate the great social artery, by a process which resembles the physical practice, patent in other days, of injecting buoyant, healthy blood into the flaccid veins of the feeble and dying! These original minds force us to think, startle us into feeling, make us ashamed of our own insignificance, inspire us to search out the purposes of our being, cry "Excelsior!" in our ears, impel us onward in the path of progress; and so, we bid them all hail! We would not exchange one hour in the society of these strong and strengthening natures for a lifetime wasted, basking in the meaningless smiles, and listening to the pretty nothings