But how strange such a charge would sound in our English ears! With us, if between two authors the most remote resemblance of idea or expression can be detected, straightway some ultraist stickler for originality — some Poeshrieks out, 'Some body must be a thief!' and forthwith, all along the highways of reviewdom, is sent up the hue and cry: Stop thief! stop thief!' For has not the law thundered from Sinai, 'Thou shalt not steal'? True, plagiarism is nowhere distinctly forbidden by Moses; but have not critics judicially pronounced it author-theft? Has not metaphor been sounded through every note of its key-board, to strike out all that is base whereunto to liken it? Have not old Dr. Johnson's seven-footed words -the tramp of whose heavy brogans has echoed down the staircase of years even unto our day-declared plagiarists from the works of buried writers 'jackals, battening on dead men's thoughts'?

And yet, after a vast deal of such like catachresis, the orthodoxy of plagiarism remains still in dispute. What we incorporate among the cardinal articles of literary faith, China abjures as a dangerous heresy. But neither our own nor the Chinese creed consists wholly of tested bullion, but is crude ore, in which the pure gold of truth is mingled with the dross of error. That is a golden tenet of the tea-growers which licenses the borrowing of ideas; that of the

earth, earthy,' which embargoes every one unborrowed. We build upon a rock when interdicting plagiarism; but on sand when we make that term inclose author-theft and author-borrowing. The making direct and unacknowledged quotations, and palming them off as the quoter's, is a very grave literary offense. But the expression of similar or even identical thoughts in different language, in this age of the world must be tolerated, or else the race of authors soon become as extinct as that of behemoths and ichthyosauri; and, indeed, far from levying any imposts upon author-borrowing, rather ought we to vote bounties and pensions to encourage it.

Originality of thought with men is impossible. There is in existence a certain amount of thought, but it all belongs to God. Lord paramount over the empire of mind as well as matter, he alone is seized, in fee simple right, of the whole domain: provinces of which men hold, as fiefs, by vassal tenure, subject to reversion and enfeoffment to another. Nor can any man absolve himself from his allegiance, and extend absolute sovereignty over broad tracts of idea-territory; for while feudal princes vested in themselves, by conquest merely, the ownership of kingdoms, God became suzerain over the empire of thought by virtue of creation-for creation confers right of property. We do not, then, originate the thoughts we call our own; or else Pantheism tells no lie when it declares that man is God, for the differentia which distinguishes God from man is absolute creative power. And if man be thought-creative, he can as well as God give being unto what was nonexistent, and that, too, not mere gross, perishable matter, but immortal soul; for thought is mind, and mind is spirit, soul, undying, immortal. Grant that, and you divide God's empire, and enthrone the creature in equal sovereignty beside his Maker.

All thought, then, belongs exclusively to God, and is parceled out by him, as he chooses, among his creature feudatories. As the wind, which bloweth where it listeth, and no one knoweth whence it cometh, save that, it is sent by God, so is thought, as it blows through our minds. Over birds, flying at liberty through the free air, boys often advance claims of ownership more specific than are easily derived from the general dominion God gave man over the beasts of the field and the birds of the air; yet, 'All those birds are mine!' exclaims a youngster in roundabout, with just as much reason as any man can claim, as exclusively his own, the thoughts which are ever winging their way through the firmament of mind.

But considered apart from the relation we sustain to God, none of us are original with respect to our fellow-men. Few, indeed, are the ideas we derive by direct grant, or through nature, from our liege lord; but far the greater share, by books or personal contact, we gather through our fellow-men. Consciously, unconsciously, we all teach - we all learn from, one another. Association does far more toward forming mind than natural endowments. As not alone the soil whence it springs makes the oak, but surrounding elements contribute. Seclude a human mind entirely from books and men, and you may have a man with no ideas borrowed from his fellows. Such a one, in Germany, once grew up from childhood to manhood in close imprisonment, and poor Kasper Hauser proved-an idiot. It can hardly be necessary to suggest the well-known fact, that the greatest readers of men and books always possess the greatest minds. Such are, besides, of the greatest service to mankind. For since God has so formed us that we love to give as well as take, a great independent mind, complete in itself and incapable of receiving from others, must always stand somewhat apart from men; and even a great heart, when conjoined as it seldom iswith a great head, is rarely able to draw bridge over the wide moat which in

trenches it in solitary loneliness. Originality ever links with it something of uncongeniality-a feeling somewhat akin to the egotism of that one who, when asked why he talked so much to himself, replied-for two reasons: the one, that he liked to talk to a sensible man; the other, that he liked to hear a sensible man talk. Divorcing itself from fellowsympathies, it broods over its own perfections, till, like Narcissus, it falls in love with itself. And so, a highly original man can rarely ever be a highly popular man or author. By the very superabundance of his excellencies, his usefulness is destroyed; just as Tarpeia sank, buried beneath the presents of the Sabine soldiery. A Man once appeared on earth, of perfect originality; and in him, to an unbounded intellect was added boundless moral power. But men received him not. They rejected his teachings; they smote him; they crucified him.

But though the right of eminent domain over ideas does and should inhere in one superior to us, far different is the case with words. These 'incarnations of thought' are of man's device, and therefore his; and style- the peculiar manner in which one uses words to express ideas-is individually personal. Indeed, style has been defined the man himself; a definition, so far as he is recognized only as a revealer of thought, substantially correct. In an idea wordembodied, the embodier, then, possesses with God concurrent ownership. The idea itself may be borrowed, or it may be his so far as discovery gives title; but the words, in their arrangement, are absolutely his. All ideas are like mathematical truths: eternal and unchangeable in their essence, and originate in nature; words like figures, of a fixed value, but of human invention; and sentences are formulæ, embodying oftentimes the same essential truth, but in shapes as various as their paternity. Words, in sentences, should then be inviolate to their author.

Nor is this to value words above ideas the flesh above the spirit of which it is but the incarnation. It is

not the intrinsic value of each that we here regard, but the value of the ownership one has in each. 'Deacon Giles and I,' said a poor man, 'own more cows than any five other men in the county.' 'How many does Deacon Giles own?' asked a bystander. 'Nineteen.' And how many do you?' 'One.' And that one cow, which that poor man owned, was worth more to him than the nineteen which were Deacon Giles's. So, when you have determined whose the style is which enfolds a thought, whose the thought is, is as little worth dispute as, after its wrappage of corn has been shelled off, the cob's ownership is worth a quarrel.

As thoughts bodied in words uttered make up conversation, thought incarnate in words written constitutes literature. The gross sum of thought with which God has seen fit to dower the human mind, though vast, is finite, and may be exhausted. Indeed, we are told this had been already done so long ago as times whereof Holy Writ takes cognizance. Since that time, then, men have been echoing and reëchoing the same old ideas. And though words, too, are finite, their permutations are infinite. What Himalayan piles of paper, rivercoursed by Danubes and Niagaras of ink, hath the 'itch of writing' aggregated! And yet, Ganganelli says that every thing that man has ever written might be contained within six thousand folio volumes, if filled with only original matter.

But how books lie heaped on one another, weighing down those under, weighed down by those above them; each crushed and crushing; their thoughts, like bones of skeletons corded in convent vault, mingled in confusion-like those which Hawthorne tells us Miriam saw in the burial- cellar of the Capuchin friars in Rome, where, when a dead brother had lain buried an allotted period, his remains, removed from earth to make room for a successor, were piled with those of others who had died before him.

It is said Aurora once sought and gained from Jove the boon of immortality

for one she loved; but forgetting to request also perpetual youth, Tithonus gradually grew old, his thin locks whitened, his wasting frame dwindled to a shadow, and his feeble voice thinned down till it became inaudible. And just so ideas, although immortal, were it not for author-borrowers, through age grown obsolete, might virtually perish. But by and by, just as some precious thought is being lost unto the world, let there come some Medea, by whose potent sorcery that old and withered idea receives new life-blood through its shrunken veins, and it starts to life again with recreated vigor-another Æson, with the bloom of youth upon him. Besides in this way playing the physician to save old ideas from a burial alive, the authorborrower often delivers many a prolific mother-thought of a whole family of children-as a prism from out a parent ray of colorless light brings all the bright colors of the spectrum, which, from red to violet, were all waiting there only for its assistance to leap into existence; or sometimes he plays the parson, wedlocking thoughts from whose union issue new; as from yellow wedded to red springs orange, a new, a secondary life; or enacts, maybe, the brood-hen's substitute. Many a thought is a Leda egg, imprisoning twin life - principles, which, incubated in the eccaleobion brain of an author-borrower, have blessed the world; but without such a foster-parent, in some neglected nest staled and addled, had never burst the shell.

Author-borrowing should also be encouraged, because it tends to language's perfection, and thus to incrementing the value of the ideas it vehicles; for though a gilding diction and elegant expression may not directly increase a thought's intrinsic worth, yet by bestowing beauty it increases its utility, and so adds relative value-just as a rosewood veneering does to a basswood table. There may be as much raw timber in a slab as in a bunch of shingles, but the latter is worth the most; it will find a purchaser where the former would not. So there may be as much truly valuable thought in a dul]

His

sermon as in a lively lecture; but the lecture will please, and so instruct, where the dull sermon will fall on an inattentive ear. Moreover, author minds are of two classes, the one deep-thinking, the other word-adroit. Providence bestows her favors frugally; and with the power of quarrying out huge lumps of thought, ability to work them over into graceful form is rarely given. This is no new doctrine, but a truth clearly recognized in metaphysics, and evidenced in history. Cromwell was a prodigious thinker; but in language, oh! how deficient. thoughts, struggling to force themselves out of that sphynx-like jargon which he spake and wrote, appear like the treasures of the shipwrecked Trojans, swimming 'rari in gurgite vasto' - Palmyra columns, reared in the midst of a desert of sentences. And Coleridge-than whom in the mines of mental science few have dug deeper, and though Xerxes-hosts of word-slaves waited on his pen-often wrote apparently mere bagatelle - the most transcendental nonsense. Yet he who takes the pains to husk away his obscurity of style will find solid ears of thought to recompense his labor. Bentham and Kant required interpretersDumont and Cousin-to make understood what was well worth understand ing. These two kinds of authorsthought-creditors and borrowing expressionists-are as mutually necessary to each other to bring out idea in its most perfect shape, as glass and mercury to mirror objects. Dim, indeed, is the reflection of the glass without its coating of quicksilver; and amalgam, without a plate on which to spread it, can never form a mirror. The metal and the silex

are

'Useless each without the other;'

tomb of Terentia burned underground for ages, but when removed into the light of day, went out in darkness.' That this sometimes occurs, we own. Some ideas are as fragile as butterflies, whom to handle is to destroy. But such are exceptions only, and should not preclude attempts at improvement. If a bungler tries and fails, let him be Anathema, Maranathema; but let not his failure deter from trial a genuine artist. Nor is it an ignoble office to be thus shapers only of great thinkers' thoughts

Python interpreters to oracles. Nor is his work of slight account who thus-as sunbeams gift dark thunder-clouds with 'silver lining' and a fringe of purple, as Time with ivy drapes a rugged wall— hangs the beauties of expression round a rude but sterling thought. Nay, oftentimes the shaper's labor is worth more than the thought he shapes. For if the stock out of which the work is wrought be ever more valuable than the workman's skill, then let canvas and paintpots impeach the fame of Raphael; rough blocks from Paros and Pentelicus, the gold and ivory of the Olympian Jove; tear from the brow of Phidias the laurel wreath with which the world has crowned him. Supply of raw material is little without the ability to use it. Furnish three men with stone and mortar, and while one is building an unsightly heap of clumsy masonry, the architect will rear up a magnificent cathedral an Angelo, a St. Peter's. And so when ideas, which in their crudeness are often as hard to be digested as unground corn, are run through the mill of another's mind, and appear in a shape suited to satisfy the most dyspeptic stomachs, does not the miller deserve a toll?

But it may be objected that in trying to improve a thought we often mar it; just as in transplanting shrubs from the barren soil in which they have become fast rooted, to one more fertile, we destroy them. Just as the fabled lamps in the

essays, by all our greatest writers. Turn to the scroll on which the world has written the names of those it holds as most illustrious. How was it with him whom English readers love to call the 'myriad-minded?' Shakspeare began by altering old plays, and his indebt

edness to history and old legends is by no means slight. How with him who sang of man's first disobedience' and exodus from Eden? Even Milton did not, Elijah-like, draw down his fire direct from heaven, but kindled with brands, borrowed from Greek and Hebrew altars, the inspiration which sent up the incense-poetry of a Lost Paradise. And all the while that Maro sang 'Arms and the Man,' a refrain from the harp of Homer was sounding in his ears, unto whose tones so piously he keyed and measured his own notes, that oftentimes we fancy we can hear the strains of 'rocky Scio's blind old bard' mingling in the Mantuan's melody. If thus it has been with those who sit highest and fastest on Parnassus--the crowned kings of mind-how has it been with the mere nobility? What are Scott's poetic romances, but blossomings of engrafted scions on that slender shoot from out the main trunk of English poetry—the old border balladry? Campbell's polished elegance of style, and the 'ivory mechanism of his verse,' was born the natural child of Beattie and Pope. Byron had Gifford in his eye when he

wrote English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,' and Spenser when he penned the 'Pilgrimage.' Pope, despairing of originality, and taking Dryden for his model, sought only to polish and to perfect. Gray borrowed from Spenser, Spenser from Chaucer, Chaucer from Dante, and Dante had ne'er been Dante but for the old Pagan mythology. Sterne and Hunt and Keats were only

Bees, in their own volumes hiving
Borrowed sweets from others' gardens.

And thus it ever is. The inceptions of true genius are always essentially imitations. A great writer does not begin by ransacking for the odd and new. He re-models-betters. Trusting not hypotheses unproven, he demonstrates himself the proposition ere he wagers his faith on the corollary; and it is thus that in time he grows to be a discoverer, an inventor, an originator.

Toward originality all should steer; but can only hope to reach it through imitation. For if originality be the Colchis where the golden fleece of immortality is won, imitation must be the Argo in which we sail thither.