Milton's "charm of half-awakened birds" means charm in the pretty old English sense of "twittering," "piping softly and confusedly."
Much of Thomas Hood's more serious work is overlooked by the public eye. Some one will be obliged to come forth by and by to say, and to say truly, that nobler poems than the "Haunted House," the "Poet's Portion," and "Death" were never written.
In the matter of reform, I should choose often to be a crab-reformer, and to move backward after many wish-worthy things of yesterday.
Thackeray says somewhere that "we see the world, each of us, with our own sight, and make from within us the world we see."
By way of experiment, a youngling of scholarly race might be kept wholly from books, etc., to see if the ancestral learning would not revive of itself.