and wait for courageous moments to
attack essentials.

In one sense, of course, and that not the least important, the great
works of Milton were the product of the history and literatures of the
world. Cycles ferried his cradle. Generations guided him. All forces were
steadily employed to complete him.

But when we attempt to separate the single strands of his complex
genealogy, to identify and arrange the influences that made him, the
essential somehow escapes us. The genealogical method in literary history
is both interesting and valuable, but we are too apt, in our admiration
for its lucid procedure, to forget that there is one thing which it will
never explain, and that thing is poetry. Books beget books; but the
mystery of conception still evades us. We display, as if in a museum, all
the bits of thought and fragments of expression that Milton may have
borrowed from Homer and Virgil, from Ariosto and Shakespeare. Here is a
far-fetched conceit, and there is an elaborately jointed comparison. But
these choice fragments and samples were to be had by any one for the
taking; what it baffles us to explain is how they came to be of so much
more use to Milton than ever they were to us. In any dictionary of
quotations you may find great thoughts and happy expressions as plentiful
and as cheap as sand, and, for the most part, quite as useless. These are
dead thoughts: to catalogue, compare, and arrange them is within the
power of any competent literary workman; but to raise them to blood-heat
again, to breathe upon them and vitalise them is the sign that proclaims
a poet. The ledger school of criticism, which deals only with borrowings
and lendings, ingeniously traced and accurately recorded, looks foolish
enough in the presence of this miracle. There is a sort of critics who,
in effect, decry poetry, by fixing their attention solely on the
possessions that poetry inherits. They are like Mammon--

the least erected Spirit that fell
From Heaven; for even in Heaven his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of Heaven's pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific.

With curious finger and thumb they pick holes in the mosaic; and wherever
there is wealth they are always ready to cry "Thief!"

There is real interest in the enumeration of Milton's borrowings, and in
the citation of parallel passages from the ancients to illustrate his