it.  But is it so?  Let us look into the matter a little more closely.  The unit of all ordinary kinds of writing is the word, and one is not commonly quarrelled with for using words that have belonged to other people.  But the unit of the lyric, like the unit of spoken conversation, is not the word but the phrase.  Now in daily human intercourse the use, which is universal and habitual, of set forms and phrases of talk is not commonly supposed to detract from, or destroy sincerity.  In the crises indeed of emotion it must be most people’s experience that the natural speech that rises unbidden and easiest to the lips is something quite familiar and commonplace, some form which the accumulated experience of many generations of separate people has found best for such circumstances or such an occasion.  The lyric is just in the position of conversation, at such a heightened and emotional moment.  It is the speech of deep feeling, that must be articulate or choke, and it falls naturally and inevitably into some form which accumulated passionate moments have created and fixed.  The course of emotional experiences differs very little from age to age, and from individual to individual, and so the same phrases may be used quite sincerely and naturally as the direct expression of feeling at its highest point by men apart in country, circumstances, or time.  This is not to say that there is no such thing as originality; a poet is a poet first and most of all because he discovers truths that have been known for ages, as things that are fresh and new and vital for himself.  He must speak of them in language that has been used by other men just because they are known truths, but he will use that language in a new way, and with a new significance, and it is just in proportion to the freshness, and the air of personal conviction and sincerity which he imparts to it, that he is great.

The point at issue bears very directly on the work of Sir Philip Sidney.  In the course of the history of English letters certain authors disengage themselves who have more than a merely literary position:  they are symbolic of the whole age in which they live, its life and action, its thoughts and ideals, as well as its mere modes of writing.  There are not many of them and they could be easily numbered; Addison, perhaps, certainly Dr. Johnson, certainly Byron, and in the later age probably Tennyson.  But the greatest of them all is Sir Philip Sidney:  his symbolical relation to the time in which he lived was realized by his contemporaries, and it has been a commonplace of history and criticism ever since.  Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at the age of twenty-three, so fast did genius ripen in that summer time of the Renaissance, William the Silent could speak of him as “one of the ripest statesmen of the age.”  He travelled widely in Europe, knew many languages, and dreamed of adventure in America and on the high seas.  In a court of brilliant