channels into which new ones are ever apt to flow; the general clamour
with which critics, nursed amidst such fetters, receive any attempts
at breaking them; the prevalence, in a wealthy and highly civilized
age, of worldly or selfish ideas; the common approximation of
characters by perpetual intercourse, as of coins, by continual rubbing
in passing from man to man, have taken away all freshness and
originality from ideas. The learned, the polished, the highly
educated, can hardly escape the fetters which former greatness throws
over the soul. Milton could not avoid them: half the images in his
poems are taken from Homer, Virgil, and Dante; and who dare hope for
emancipation when Milton was enthralled? The mechanical arts increase
in perfection as society advances. Science ever takes its renewed
flights from the platform which former efforts have erected. Industry,
guided by experience, in successive ages, brings to the highest point
all the contrivances and inventions which minister to the comfort or
elegances of life. But it is otherwise with genius. It sinks in the
progress of society, as much as science and the arts rise. The country
of Homer and AEschylus sank for a thousand years into the torpor of the
Byzantine empire. Originality perishes amidst acquisition. Freshness
of conception is its life: like the flame, it burns fierce and clear
in the first gales of a pure atmosphere; but languishes and dies in
that polluted by many breaths.

It was the resurrection of the human mind, after the seclusion and
solitary reflection of the middle ages, which gave this vein of
original ideas to Dante, as their first wakening had given to Homer.
Thought was not extinct; the human mind was not dormant during the
dark ages; far from it--it never, in some respects, was more active.
It was the first collision of their deep and lonely meditations with
the works of the great ancient poets, which occasioned the prodigy.
Universally it will be found to be the same. After the first flights
of genius have been taken, it is by the collision of subsequent
thought with it that the divine spark is again elicited. The meeting
of two great minds is necessary to beget fresh ideas, as that of two
clouds is to bring forth lightning, or the collision of flint and
steel to produce fire. Johnson said he could not get new ideas till he
had read. He was right; though it is not one in a thousand who strikes
out original thoughts from studying the wor