scientific, which endows the _Angler_ of his cotemporary Walton, with
its enduring charm, and which is to be acquired only by living in the
open country in childhood. Milton is not a man of the fields, but of
books. His life is in his study, and when he steps abroad into the air
he carries his study thoughts with him. He does look at nature, but he
sees her through books. Natural impressions are received from without,
but always in those forms of beautiful speech, in which the poets of
all ages have clothed them. His epithets are not, like the epithets of
the school of Dryden and Pope, culled from the _Gradus ad Parnassum_;
they are expressive of some reality, but it is of a real emotion in
the spectator's soul, not of any quality detected by keen insight
in the objects themselves. This emotion Milton's art stamps with an
epithet, which shall convey the added charm of classical reminiscence.
When, e.g., he speaks of "the wand'ring moon," the original
significance of the epithet comes home to the scholarly reader with
the enhanced effect of its association with the "errantem lunam" of
Virgil. Nor because it is adopted from Virgil has the epithet here the
second-hand effect of a copy. If Milton sees nature through books, he
still sees it.

To behold the wand'ring moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray.
Through the heaven's wide pathless way,
And oft, as if her head she bow'd,
Stooping through a fleecy cloud.

No allegation that "wand'ring moon" is borrowed from Horace can hide
from us that Milton, though he remembered Horace, had watched the
phenomenon with a feeling so intense that he projected his own soul's