as the
blood-disks in our own veins. And so long as wonder lasts, so long will
imagination find thread for her loom, and sit like the Lady of Shalott
weaving that magical web in which "the shows of things are accommodated
to the desires of the mind."

It is precisely before this phenomenon of life in literature and
language that criticism is forced to stop short. That it is there we
know, but what it is we cannot precisely tell. It flits before us like
the bird in the old story. When we think to grasp it, we already hear it
singing just beyond us. It is the imagination which enables the poet to
give away his own consciousness in dramatic poetry to his characters, in
narrative to his language, so that they react upon us with the same
original force as if they had life in themselves.

II. STYLE AND MANNER

Where Milton's style is fine it is _very_ fine, but it is always liable
to the danger of degenerating into mannerism. Nay, where the imagination
is absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theological
discussions in "Paradise Lost," it becomes mannerism of the most
wearisome kind. Accordingly, he is easily parodied and easily imitated.
Philips, in his "Splendid Shilling," has caught the trick exactly:

Not blacker tube nor of a shorter size
Smokes Cambrobriton (versed in pedigree,
Sprung from Cadwallader and Arthur, kings
Full famous in romantic tale) when he,
O'er many a craggy hill and barren cliff,
Upon a cargo of famed Cestrian cheese
High overshadowing rides, with a design
To vend his wares or at the Arvonian mart.
Or Maridunum, or the ancient town
Yclept Brechinia, or where Vaga's stream
Encircles Ariconium, fruitful soil.

Philips has caught, I say, Milton's trick; his real secret he could
never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable. But all
authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies
less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become
mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily
imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his
time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence
has in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined by
him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is
circumlocution in the crow of a cock. Cowper was only saved by mixing
equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind of
c