Listen also to the testimony of our own Milton, who, in one of his elegies, gives voice to the belief that he owed his genius to the spring, and, like a tree in the budding woods, was wont to blossom into song beneath the vivifying spirit of that genial time. "Fallor?" he asks,
" Fallor? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires,
Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest?"[1]
The sublimest works of intelligence, then, are quite possible, and may be easily conceived to be executed without any consciousness of them on the part of the apparent and immediate agent. Suppose man to be actuated throughout his whole nature by the might of some foreign agency; and he may realise the most stupendous operations, and yet remain in darkness, and incognisant of them all the while. A cognisance of these operations certainly does not necessarily go hand in hand with their performance. What is there in the workings of human passion that consciousness should necessarily accompany it, any more than it does the tossings of the stormy sea? What is there in the radiant emotions which issue forth in song, that consciousness should naturally and necessarily accompany them, any more than it does the warblings and the dazzling verdure of the sun-lit woods? What is there in the exercise of reason, that consciousness should inevitably go along with it, any more than it accompanies the mechanic skill with which the spider spreads his claggy snares? There
- ↑ Miltoni Poemata. Elegia quinta. In adventum Veris.
