"And Milton says, 'They have no such thing as spiritual food; they are only swolln with wind.' At first you may think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But, again, it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of 'Spirit.' It is only a contraction of the Latin word 'breath,' and an indistinct translation of the Greek word for 'wind.' The same word is used in writing. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth;' and 'So is every one that is born of the Spirit,' born of the breath, that is, for it means the breath of God, in soul and body. We have the true sense of it in our words 'inspiration' and 'expire.' Now, there are two kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled; God's breath and man's. The breath of God is health and life and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath—the word he calls spiritual—is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a body by the vapors of its own decomposition. This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last and fatalest sign of it is that 'puffing up.'
"Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of the keys, for now we can understand them. Note the difference between Milton and Dante in their interpretation of this power; for once the latter is weaker in thought; he supposes both the keys to be of the gate of heaven; one is of gold, the other of silver; they are given by St. Peter to the sentinel angel, and it is not easy to determine the meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the gate or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key of heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison, in which the wicked teachers are to be bound who 'have taken away the key of knowledge, yet entered not in themselves.'
"We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to see and feed, and, of all who do so, it is said, 'He that watereth, shall be watered also himself.' But the reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be withered himself, and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of sight,—shut into the perpetual prison house. And that prison opens here as well as hereafter; he who is to be bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. That command to the strong angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, 'Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out,' issues, in its measure, against the teacher for every help withheld, and for every truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced; so that he is more strictly fettered the more he fetters, and further outcast as he more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as 'the golden opes, the iron shuts amain.'
"We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is yet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which is rightly called 'reading,' watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly to say, 'Thus Milton thought,' not 'Thus I thought, in misreading Milton.'"
3. In reading successive poems and prose selections from different authors, strong resemblances in thought or language are frequently detected. It is a thought-provoking process to bring such similar passages to a definite comparison. Even where the same topic is treated differently by two authors, the different or contrasted points of view are suggestive. Calling such familiar passages to mind is in itself a good practice, and it is well to cultivate this mode of turning previous knowledge into use.
To illustrate this point, let us call to mind some familiar passages, touching the winter snow-storm and the fireside comforts, from Whittier, Emerson, and Lowell.
Whittier's description of a snow-storm in "Snow-Bound" is well known:—
"Unwarmed by any sunset light
The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag wavering to and fro
Crossed and recrossed the winged snow:
And ere the early bedtime came
The white drift piled the window-frame,
And through the glass the clothes-line posts
Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.
"So all night long the storm roared on:
The morning broke without a sun;
In tiny spherule traced with lines
Of Nature's geometric signs,
In starry flake and pellicle
All day the hoary meteor fell;
And, when the second morning shone,
We looked upon a world unknown,
On nothing we could call our own.
Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament,
No cloud above, no earth below,—
A universe of sky and snow!
The old familiar sights of ours
Took marvellous shapes; strange domes and towers
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood,
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood;
A smooth white mound the brush-pile showed,
A fenceless drift what once was road;
The bridle-post an old man sat
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat;
The well-curb had a Chinese roof;
And even the long sweep, high aloof,
In its slant splendor, seemed to tell
Of Pisa's leaning miracle."
Again the fireside joy is expressed:—