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But the silence of Homer is never a safe argument in favour of his ignorance, any more than the absence of allusion to tobacco in Shakspeare is a proof that tobacco was, in his age, unknown. We shall find that a barbaric people, the Pawnees, hold a mystery precisely parallel to the Demeter legend: a Mystery necessarily unborrowed from Greece.
Works of this character are a genuine service; after the short-lived gibes of the profane have subsided, they are found to have cleared the air. They remind people that the faculty of taking a direct, independent, unborrowed impression is not altogether lost. In this very rapid review I have accompanied Mr. Sargent to a very recent date.
The likeness is occasionally too strange, or demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous presentation. Indeed his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.
To study, with the artist, the least of her beauties, to explore, with the man of science, the smallest of her wonders, or even simply to wander among her exhaustless resources, like a child, needing no interest unborrowed from the eye, this feeds body and brain and heart and soul together. But I see that your attention is wandering a little, Dolorosus, and perhaps I ought not to be surprised.
No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the wildest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears.
In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and is sometimes recondite. But in imaginative power he stands nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, he does indeed to all thoughts and to all objects
The whole song possessed the nameless charm peculiar to unborrowed thought, but four continually-recurring lines shone out from the rest like the blaze of the hearth whose joys they celebrated. Into them, working magic with a few simple words, the poet had instilled the very essence of domestic love and household happiness, and they were poetry and picture joined in one.
In the numbers, there is much sweetness and freedom: and though they have somewhat of the masculine melody of Dryden, yet they have something also that is peculiarly his own. He has in a few instances enriched the language of poetry by combinations unborrowed from any of his predecessors. It is doubtful whether as much can be said for Pope's translation of Homer.
But he tells first how in his youth Nature was all in all to him, "nor needed a moral sense unborrowed from the eye," but later the inner light came; and hear him in his maturer years: "For I have learned To look on Nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue.
Coleridge deliberately placed Wordsworth "nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own."
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