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the poetical vocabulary of the Greeks, personated their various passions, 

 conceptions, sciences and arts ; the Olympic deities, the Fates, the Furies, 

 the Muses, the Graces, the Dryads, Nymphs and Fauns, with whom their 

 rich and fertile fancy delighted to people their lovely and romantic 

 land, were natural and appropriate to them; but when borrowed and 

 artificially introduced into the poetry of modern England, they became 

 a learned and pedantic affectation. Yet from the age of Elizabeth 

 downwards for a long time, English poets generally deemed it necessary 

 to write as though their readers were practically familiar with the 

 imagery and mythology of the ancient Greeks. When both writers 

 and readers have had a learned and classical education, it is certainly 

 possible that the images and conceptions thus acquired may become a 

 second nature to them, so as to admit of much genuine poetry, that is, 

 of the lively expression of much sterling emotion and inspired feeling. 

 This might be the case even if the poems were written in the Greek or 

 Latin language, and some 'English poets, Milton for example, have 

 written Latin poems of considerable power and beauty. Milton is a 

 signal example also of the possibility of combining, in English poetry, 

 the freshness of original genius with a learued litei'ary style, and a 

 profusion of classical as well as Scriptural lore. But even in the 

 magnificent poetry of Milton, those passages which come most closely 

 home to the experience of common human life, are those in which the 

 true poetical spii'it is most powerfully evinced. The descriptions of 

 Adam and Eve, their conversations, their joys, their sorrows, their 

 guilt, and the poet's exquisite allusion to his own blindness when des- 

 cribing the creation of light, affect us more strongly than the grand 

 conceptions of the angelic host and the infernal fiends ; and for this 

 good reason, that the former proceeded from a fountain of natural 

 feeling in the poet's own heart. Only that whicli comes from the 

 heart can deeply move the hearts of others. And for the same reason 

 I believe the most genuine and thrilling poetrj' must always be 

 expressed in our native language, or what we expressively call our 

 mother-tongue. The language which we learn in childhood, in which 

 our first wants are expressed, our first ideas come to us, our first 

 feelings are uttered, will always have more power to move the imagina- 

 tion and the heart than any foreign language, however carefully 

 learned in after life. Accordingly, those passages even in Milton in 

 which the poetry moves us most strongly, are those in which the words 

 are drawn from the " pure weU of English undefiled ;" and he pays a 

 conscious and worthy tribute to the purely English poetry of his great 



predecessor, when he expresses his delight to hear — 



" sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's child, 



Warble liis native wooil-note>i wikl." 



