Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/346

 330 CRITICAL STUDIES takes now to waters never sailed, that Minerva breathes the breeze, Apollo pilots, and the nine Muses are as his compass to point out the north, using indeed the antique names, with that profound and uncritical reverence for the classics which long survived the Renaissance, but evidently meaning, in all earnestness (as commentators have pointed out) by Apollo and the Muses, God and His Holy Spirit, or gifts of grace. So Spenser, when beginning his " P'aerie Queene," he supplicates : " Help then, O ! holy virgin, chiefe of nyne ; " and in the introduction to the last book we have complete : " Ye sacred imps, that on Parnasso dwell." So Milton, opening his " Paradise Lost " and " Paradise Regained," and living at a time when he could shadow the old names ; though in his poems the classical and Biblical mythologies are often very confused, calls upon the heavenly Muse and the Holy Spirit. Finally, let us gather a few sentences from Shelley's noble unfinished " Defence of Poetry," which is per- vaded throughout with this doctrine of inspiration, and which suffers cruelly, as all high and harmonious work must in being sampled by fragments.* " Language, colour, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of poetry ; they may • One rejoices in the association of Sir Philip Sidney and Shelley. Their families became allied by the (second) marriage of Shelley's paternal grandfather, Sir Bysshe, to the heiress of Penshurst, their eldest son assuming the name of Shelley-Sidney, and being ancestor of the present master of Penshurst, Lord De L'Isle and Dudley. But Sidney and Shelley were much more closely allied in their supremacy of magnanimous and chivalrous character ; and two centuries and a quarter before Shelley wrote the " Defence," Sidney had written "An Apologie for Poetry" (1595; reprinted by Mr. Arber, cost sixpence).