be defined as unblest theft--the theft of what you
do not want, and cannot use.

In these and many other passages of eighteenth-century verse it may be
seen how literary reminiscence sometimes strangles poetry; and how a
great man suffers at the hands of his disciples and admirers. The thing
has happened so often that it ceases to cause surprise; were not Lydgate
and Occleve pupils (save the mark!) of Chaucer? And yet it remains a
paradox that Milton's, of all styles in the world, unapproachable in its
loftiness, invented by a temper of the most burning zeal and the
profoundest gravity for the treatment of a subject wildly intractable by
ordinary methods, should have been chosen by a generation of
philosophical organ-grinders as the fittest pattern for their
professional melodies; and that a system of diction employed by a blind
man for the description of an imaginary world should have been borrowed
by landscape-gardeners and travelling pedlars for the setting forth of
their works and their wares.

EPILOGUE

In the meantime, while Dryden and Milton both had their schools, most of
our seventeenth-century poetry fell into an almost complete oblivion.
Dryden's satiric, and Milton's epic strains engrossed attention, and
shaped the verses of an age. But the seventeenth century was
extraordinarily wealthy in poetic kinds quite distinct from these: in
metaphysic, and mysticism, in devotional ecstasy, and love-lyric, and
romance. The English genius in poetry is essentially metaphysical and
romantic. Milton was neither. He could not have excelled in any of these
kinds; nor have come near to Suckling, or Crashaw, or Vaughan, or
Herrick, or Marvell, in their proper realms. It is a permissible
indulgence, therefore, in taking leave of Milton, to turn from the
_Paradise Lost_ for a moment, and, escaping from the solid materialism of
the heroic and epic strain, to find passion once more among the Court
lyrists, and spiritual insight among the retired mystics, to find
Religion and Love, and the humility that has access to both. A profound
humility, impossible to Milton, inspired Vaughan when he wrote such a
verse as this:--

There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim!

There is a natural vision, and there is a spiritual vision; the spiritual
belongs t