Somebody had better have held his tongue. No. They occur by natural association. He wants aid of the Muse who inspired Moses—I suppose, who sustained—that is, gave his style—of the other writers in the Old Testament. To suppose her visiting Moses on either peak of the Sacred Hill where he had his divine communions, is obvious and inevitable, and, I hope, solemn and sublime too. To suppose her accompanying the migration of the Israelites, and as she had devoutly affected their Sacred Mountain of the Wilderness, also devoutly affecting their Holy Mountain at the foot of which they built their Metropolis, is a spontaneous and unavoidable process of thought. Sinai and Sion represent, as if they contain embodied, the religion and history blended of the race. And if the divine Muse has two divine Hills, how can Milton help thinking of the quasi-divine Hill on which were gathered the nine quasi-divine Sisters? Doubtless, three distinct Mountains in the first sixteen lines, if absolutely considered, may seem cumbrous and overwhelming. But accept them for what they are in the Invocation; the two first localisings of the one Muse, they are easy. Why should not her wing skim from peak to peak? and Parnassus looms in the distance on the horizon. SEWARD. A more urgent and trying question is, _what_ does he invoke? We have a sort of biographical information respecting the Address to the Spirit. Milton did believe himself under its especial influences, and the Address is a direct and proper Prayer. But _what_ is this Muse? To us the old Muses—whatever they may have been to the Greeks—are Impersonations, and nothing more, of powers in our own souls. If name attest nature, such is the muse of Milton—a power of his own soul—but one which dwelt also in the soul of the great Hebrew shepherd. Say, for the sake of a determining notion, the power of the austere and simple religious sublime. A human power, but moved by contact of the soul with divine subjects. Perhaps I say too bluntly that those old Muses were mostly but impersonations of human powers. An abstruse, difficult, and solemn part of our existence is touched, implicated. We find when we are deeply moved that powers which slept in us awake;—Powers which have before awaked, and fallen back in sleep;—Powers, too, that have never before awaked. NORTH.