the folly of the few.

There is another circumstance that may be mentioned, which, particularly
as regards the question of repetition and novelty that is now under
consideration, may seem to operate in an eminent degree in favour of
science, while it casts a most discouraging veil over poetry and the
pure growth of human fancy and invention. Poetry is, after all, nothing
more than new combinations of old materials. Nihil est in intellectu,
quod non fuit prius in sensu. The poet has perhaps in all languages been
called a maker, a creator: but this seems to be a vain-glorious and an
empty boast. He is a collector of materials only, which he afterwards
uses as best he may be able. He answers to the description I have heard
given of a tailor, a man who cuts to pieces whatever is delivered to him
from the loom, that he may afterwards sew it together again. The poet
therefore, we may be told, adds nothing to the stock of ideas and
conceptions already laid up in the storehouse of mind. But the man who
is employed upon the secrets of nature, is eternally in progress; day
after day he delivers in to the magazine of materials for thinking and
acting, what was not there before; he increases the stock, upon which
human ingenuity and the arts of life are destined to operate. He does
not, as the poet may be affirmed by his censurers to do, travel for
ever in a circle, but continues to hasten towards a goal, while at every
interval we may mark how much further he has proceeded from the point at
which his race began.

Much may be said in answer to this, and in vindication and honour of the
poet and the artist. All that is here alleged to their disadvantage,
is in reality little better than a sophism. The consideration of the
articles he makes use of, does not in sound estimate detract from the
glories of which he is the artificer. Materiem superat opus. He changes
the nature of what he handles; all that he touches is turned into
gold. The manufacture he delivers to us is so new, that the thing it
previously was, is no longer recognisable. The impression that he makes
upon the imagination and the heart, the impulses that he communicates to
the understanding and the moral feeling, are all his own; and, "if there
is any thing lovely and of good report, if there is any virtue and any
praise," he may well claim our applauses and our thankfulness for what
he has effected.

There is a still further advantage that belongs to the poet and th