Yes, reader, in the case of commonplace screws, if hey do their work well, it is in spite of their being screws.  But in the case of great geniuses who are screws, it is often because of their unsoundness that they do the fine things they do.  It is the hectic beauty which his morbid mind cast upon his page, that made Byron the attractive and fascinating poet that he is to young and inexperienced minds.  Had his views been sounder and his feeling healthier, he might have been but a commonplace writer after all.  In poetry, and in all imaginative writing, we look for beauty, not for sense; and we all know that what is properly disease and unsoundness sometimes adds to beauty.  You know the delicate flush, the bright eyes, the long eyelashes, which we often see in a young girl on whom consumption is doing its work.  You know the peachy complexion which often goes with undeveloped scrofula.  And had Charles Lamb not been trembling on the verge of insanity, the Essays of Elia would have wanted great part of their strange, undefinable charm.  Had Ford and Massinger led more regular lives and written more reasonable sentiments, what a caput mortuum their tragedies would be!  Had Coleridge been a man of homely common-sense, he would never have written Christabel.  I remember in my boyhood reading The Ancient Mariner to a hard-headed lawyer of no literary taste.  He listened to the poem, and merely remarked that its author was a horrible fool.

There is no doubt that physical unsoundness often is a cause of mental excellence.  Some of the best women on earth are the ugliest.  Their ugliness cut them off from the enjoyment of the gaieties of life; they did not care to go to a ball-room and sit all the evening without once being asked to dance; and so they learned to devote themselves to better things.  You have seen the pretty sister, a frivolous, silly flirt; the homely sister, quietly devoting herself to works of Christian charity.  Ugly people, we often hear it said, cry up the beauties of the mind.  It may be added, that ugly people possess a very large proportion of those beauties.  And a great deal of the best intellectual work is done by men who are physically screws; by men who are nearly blind, broken-winded, lame, and weakly.  We all know what the Apostle Paul was physically; we know too what the world owes to that dwarfish, bald, stammering man.  I never in my life read anything more touching than the story of that poor weakly creature, Dr. George Wilson, the Professor of Technology in the University of Edinburgh.  Poor weakly creature, only in a physical sense; what a noble intellectual and moral nature dwelt within that slender frame!  You remember how admirably he did his work, though in a condition of almost ceaseless bodily weakness and suffering; how he used to lecture often with a great blister on his chest; how his lungs and his entire system were the very poorest that could just retain his soul.  I never saw him; but I have seen his portrait.  You see the intellectual