usly whence they came. Our proper
business is to adapt and mold and act upon them. Of poets perhaps this
is true even more remarkably than of other men: their ideas are
suggested in modes, and according to laws, which are even more
impossible to specify than the ideas of the rest of the world.
Second-hand poetry, so to say, often seems quite original to the poet
himself; he frequently does not know that he derived it from an old
memory: years afterwards it may strike him as it does others. Still,
in general, such inferior species of creation is not so likely to be
found in minds of singular originality as in those of less. A
brooding, placid, cultivated mind, like that of Gray, is the place
where we should expect to meet with it. Great originality disturbs the
adaptive process, removes the mind of the poet from the thoughts of
other men, and occupies it with its own heated and flashing thoughts.
Poetry of the second degree is like the secondary rocks of modern
geology,--a still, gentle, alluvial formation: the igneous glow of
primary genius brings forth ideas like the primeval granite, simple,
astounding, and alone. Milton's case is an exception to this rule.
His mind has marked originality, probably as much of it as any in
literature: but it has as much of molded recollection as any mind, too.
His poetry in consequence is like an artificial park, green and soft
and beautiful, yet with outlines bold, distinct, and firm, and the
eternal rock ever jutting out; or better still, it is like our own lake
scenery where nature has herself the same combination, where we have
Rydal Water side by side with the everlasting upheaved mountain.
Milton has the same union of softened beauty with unimpaired grandeur;
and it is his peculiarity.

These are the two contrasts which puzzle us at first in Milton, and
which distinguish him from other poets in our remembrance afterwards.
We have a superficial complexity in illustration and imagery and
metaphor; and in contrast with it we observe a latent simplicity of
idea, an almost rude strength of conception. The underlying thoughts
are few, though the flowers on the surface are so many. We have
likewise the perpetual contrast of the soft poetry of the memory, and
the firm--as it were, fused--and glowing poetry of the imagination.
His words, we may half fancifully say, are like his character: there is
the same austerity in the real essence, the same exquisiteness of
sense, the same d