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people. I know you and my good friend Mr. Clay 
will smile at my grave politics; and you in the 
midst of your library and kingdom of nature look 
down on the miserable mortals who are busy in 
speaking of Milton’s periods; yet Milton employs the same 
word while speaking of himself, in the finest elegiac poem that 
was ever written, for ‘the force of language can no further go.” 
“ Thus sang the uncouth swain to th’ okes and rills, 
While the still morn went out with sandals gray ; 
He touch’d the tender stops of various quills, 
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.” 
How would the excellent father of Sir James Smith have de- 
lighted in the interchange of thoughts and ideas with Dr. Chan- 
ning, upon Milton alone! Speaking of the intellectual qualities 
of our great poet, in his ‘‘ Remarks on the Character and Writ- 
ings of Milton,” Dr. C. has observed, “ that the very splendour 
of his poetic fame has tended to obscure and conceal the extent 
of his mind and the variety of its energies and attainments.—Of 
all God’s gifts of intellect, Milton esteemed poetical genius the 
most transcendent. He esteemed it in himself as a kind of in- 
spiration, and wrote his great works with something of the 
conscious dignity of a prophet. It seems to us the divinest of 
all arts; for it is the breathing or expression of that principle or 
sentiment which is deepest and sublimest in human nature,—we 
mean of that thirst or aspiration to which no mind is wholly a 
stranger, for something purer and lovelier, something more 
powerful, lofty, and thrilling, than ordinary and real life affords. 
“ But we rejoice,” continues Dr. Channing, “that the dust 
is beginning to be wiped from Milton’s prose writings, and that 
the public are now learning, what the initiated have long known, 
that these contain passages hardly inferior to his best poetry, 
and that they are throughout marked with the same vigorous 
mind which gave us Paradise Lost. We recommend them to 
all who can enjoy great beauties in the neighbourhood of faults, 
and who would learn the compass, energy, and richness of our 
