writers of prose that these, for their part, owe to poets, it is
the poets who must be accounted chief protectors, in the last
resort, of our common inheritance. Every page of the works of that
great exemplar of diction, Milton, is crowded with examples of
felicitous and exquisite meaning given to the infallible word.
Sometimes he accepts the secondary and more usual meaning of a word
only to enrich it by the interweaving of the primary and
etymological meaning. Thus the seraph Abdiel, in the passage that
narrates his offer of combat to Satan, is said to "explore" his own
undaunted heart, and there is no sense of "explore" that does not
heighten the description and help the thought. Thus again, when
the poet describes those


Eremites and friars,
White, Black, and Gray, with all their trumpery,


who inhabit, or are doomed to inhabit, the Paradise of Fools, he
seems to invite the curious reader to recall the derivation of
"trumpery," and so supplement the idea of worthlessness with that
other idea, equally grateful to the author, of deceit. The
strength that extracts this multiplex resonance of meaning from a
single note is matched by the grace that gives to Latin words like
"secure," "arrive," "obsequious," "redound," "infest," and "solemn"
the fine precision of intent that art can borrow from scholarship.

Such an exactitude is consistent with vital change; Milton himself
is bold to write "stood praying" for "continued kneeling in
prayer," and deft to transfer the application of "schism" from the