ter of Eve is
still the simplest sort of feminine essence,--the pure embodiment of
that inner nature which we believe and hope that women have. The
character of Satan, though it is not so easily described, has nearly as
few elements in it. The most purely modern conceptions will not bear
to be unclothed in this manner: their romantic garment clings
inseparably to them. Hamlet and Lear are not to be thought of except
as complex characters, with very involved and complicated embodiments.
They are as difficult to draw out in words as the common characters of
life are; that of Hamlet, perhaps, is more so. If we make it, as
perhaps we should, the characteristic of modern and romantic art that
it presents us with creations which we cannot think of or delineate
except as very varied and so to say circumstantial, we must not rank
Milton among the masters of romantic art. And without involving the
subject in the troubled sea of an old controversy, we may say that the
most striking of the poetical peculiarities of Milton is the bare
simplicity of his ideas and the rich abundance of his illustrations.

Another of his peculiarities is equally striking. There seems to be
such a thing as second-hand poetry: some poets, musing on the poetry of
other men, have unconsciously shaped it into something of their own.
The new conception is like the original, it would never probably have
existed had not the original existed previously: still, it is
sufficiently different from the original to be a new thing, not a copy
or a plagiarism; it is a creation, though so to say, a suggested
creation.

Gray is as good an example as can be found of a poet whose works abound
in this species of semi-original conceptions. Industrious critics
track his best lines back, and find others like them which doubtless
lingered near his fancy while he was writing them. The same critics
have been equally busy with the works of Milton, and equally
successful. They find traces of his reading in half his works; not,
which any reader could do, in overt similes and distinct illustrations,
but also in the very texture of the thought and the expression. In
many cases doubtless, they discover more than he himself knew. A mind
like his, which has an immense store of imaginative recollections, can
never know which of his own imaginations is exactly suggested by which
recollection. Men awake with their best ideas; it is seldom worth
while to investigate very curio