Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of the body.  And, as the magic lantern acts best in a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most completely in a dark age.  As the light of knowledge breaks in upon its exhibitions, as the outlines of certainty become more and more definite, and the shades of probability more and more distinct, the hues and lineaments of the phantoms which the poet calls up grow fainter and fainter.  We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.  He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind.  He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has, perhaps, constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority.  His very talents will be a hinderance to him.  His difficulties will be proportioned to his proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable among his contemporaries; and that proficiency will in general be proportioned to the vigor and activity of his mind.  And it is well if, after all his sacrifices and exertions, his works do not resemble a lisping man or a modern ruin.  We have seen in our own time great talents, intense labor, and long meditation employed in this struggle against the spirit of the age, and employed, we will not say absolutely in vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause.

If these reasonings be just, no poet has ever triumphed over greater difficulties than Milton.  He received a learned education:  he was a profound and elegant classical scholar:  he had studied all the mysteries of rabbinical literature:  he was intimately acquainted with every language in modern Europe from which either pleasure or information was then to be derived.  He was perhaps the only poet of later times who has been distinguished by the excellence of his Latin verse.  The genius of Petrarch was scarcely of the first order; and his poems in the ancient language, though much praised by those who have never read them, are wretched compositions.  Cowley, with all his admirable wit and ingenuity, had little imagination:  nor, indeed, do we think his classical diction comparable to that of Milton.  The authority of Johnson is against us on this point.  But Johnson had studied the bad writers of the Middle Ages till he had become utterly insensible to the Augustan elegance, and was as ill-qualified to judge between two Latin styles as an habitual drunkard to set up for a wine-taster.