Yes, Seward. We consider these things. We consider the laborious, learned, and solemn studies, by which we are told, by which Milton tells us, that he endeavoured to qualify himself for performing his great work, and I propose this account of this first Invocation, stripped of its Poetical garb. In the first place, that the subject of desire to the Poet—the thing asked—is high, grave, reverend, sublime, fitted Style or Expression. As for the addressing, and the power of the wish, you may remember that, as we hear, employing human means, he assiduously read, or caused to be read, the profane, and his native, and the Sacred Writers—drawing thence his manner of poetical speech. TALBOYS. “_Heavenly_” Muse is opposed to “_Olympian_” Muse; as if “_Hebraic_” to “_Hellenic_;” as if “Scriptural” to “Classical;” as if “_Sacred_” to “_Profane_;” as if Muse of Zion to Muse of Pindus. Therefore we must ask—What “_Muse_” ordinarily means? We know what it meant in the mouth of a believing Greek. It meant a _real person_—a divine being of a lower Order. But Milton is a Christian—for whom those deities are no more. _They_ are, in his eye, mere imaginations—air. “For Thou art heavenly! _She_ (the Hellenic) an _empty dream_.” And so already— “The meaning, not _the name_, I call.” To wit, the Hellenic is to him a name—_air_. SEWARD. We must ask—What does, in ordinary Verse, not in sacred poetry, a Christian poet mean, when He names, and yet more when he invokes, the Muse—the Sacred Sisters nine? And we are thrown upon recognising the widely-spread literary fact—not unattractive or quite unimportant—that Christendom cherished this reminiscence of Heathendom; that, in fact, our poetry seems to rest for a part of its life upon this airy relic of a fled mythology—varied in all ways, Muse, Helicon, Hippocrene, &c. Greatest Poets, not poetasters, the inspired, not the imitative and servile—and at height of occasion. Thus Shakspeare— “O for a Muse of fire that would ascend The highest heaven of invention! A kingdom for a stage!” &c. Spenser—at entering upon his vast Poem— “Me all too mean the Sacred Muse areeds.” And the master of good plain sense in verse, Pope, acknowledges the ineradicably rooted expression— “Drink deep, or taste not the _Pierian spring_.”