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by the awakening voice, the animating example, and the cordial companionship of Newton. Nor is this said in disparagement of any happy influence which Mrs. Unwin, Lady Austen, or other inspirers of his verse, occasionally exercised over him in the sequel. But by enlisting Cowper, as his coadjutor, in the Olney Hymns, Newton gave to the poet's mind both the bias and the impulse which ever afterwards directed its course.
There are few joint-memorials of friendship and talents, raised by kindred spirits, in polite literature, Every other species of art may be successfully practised by "many men and many minds." In architecture, sculpture, and painting, the diversified talents of various hands may often be so harmoniously associated as to form a magnificent whole; because the composition, however exquisitely and intellectually designed, consists of material parts,, and is accomplished by manual process. But those original works of genius, of which language is the expression, scarcely admit of fellowship, either in conception or execution. One book must be the product of one brain, in which, to constitute excellence, there ought to be as strict unity of thought and diction as the ancient critic required of time and place in dramatic action. Now, two minds cannot think simultaneously; nor can one express a thought suggested by another, in terms which shall convey it to a third with precisely the same impression as it was felt by the first. Language in itself being as invisible and immaterial as the ideas which it communicates, those ideas will necessarily be best communicated in his language who first conceived them; and though others may seize hints, and carry them out into more perfect and beautiful exhibition than the inventors could have done, yet the original
