In
proportion as they cultivate one and the same God in their minds,
will their minds necessarily unite and harmonize; but without this is
done, permanent harmony is impossible."
It is, I conceive, salutary for us to take this enlarged view
of literature. We should seek after literary perfection in this
cosmopolite spirit, and embrace it wherever we find it, as a divine
gift; for, in the words of Pope,
"both precepts and example tell
That nature's masterpiece is writing well."
So was it with the august and prophetic Milton. To him
literature was a universal presence. He regarded it as the common
delight and glory of gods and men. He felt that its _moral beauty_
lived and flourished in the large heart of humanity itself, and could
never be monopolized by times or places. Most deeply do I think and
feel with Milton, when he utters the following words. "What God may
have determined for me, I know not; but this I know, that if ever he
instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of any man,
he has instilled it into mine. Hence wherever I find a man despising
the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring to aspire in sentiment
and language and conduct to what the highest wisdom through every age
has taught us, as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a kind of
necessary attachment.
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