Bisbee daily review., 1907-08-18
THE GREAT WRITER'S.
Ideas and Inspiration Taken by One Author From Another.
BUT GENIUS SORROWS NoBLf
The Crude Ore is Refined and the Ray. Material Fashioned Into a Thing ei 5eauty-shakespeare as . Most Bril- liant Example.


 5sauty-shaksspsare as Most Bril- | liant Example. Our great writers are not great rob bers. Literature is not a repository of stolen goods. What seem like steal. ings by the steel pen are rather the output of the lapidary or reissue of the mint or, better still, the borrow ings from a bank repaid with interest
 Tt is wonderful" says Charles Reade, "how genius can borrow" "All ' literature" remarks Oliver Wendell Holmes, dives by borrowing and lend. ing" and, he adds, "A good image is i like a diamond. which may be set a hundred times in as many generations and gain new beauties with every | change This is not a question of originality. "The lighting a candle at q neighbours fire" observes Dean Swift, docs not affect our property in the wick and flame" Genius bor- | rows nobly." The transference is often a transmutation. For brass, the borrower brings gold, and for iron, silver. and for wood, brass, and for stones, iron. The crude ore is refined | and the raw material fashioned into thing of beauty.
 It has been pointed out by Mir. Huh in his life of Buckle" that there Is a kind of pedigree in literature Dante ayows his indebtedness to Virgil. as tions to Homer.
 Ariosto owes much to Virgil. and Spenser borrows frequently from Ariosto. Sponsors "Faerie Queene" gave birth to Fletcher's Purple Is land" and this to Bernard's Isle Of Man. and this in turn to Defoe's Robinson Crusee' and Bunyan's "Piigrim's Progress"-all like so many blossoms rising from the one stem
 Shakespeare has been called .'the great warwickshire thief" so inveter- ate is his borrowing habit. He invaded literature like q Napoleon and brought back the rarest art treasures to enrich and beautify his verse. One is sur prised to learn that our dramatist has no original plots. that he has given to poetry no new rhythm or stanza and that ''he ran not only in the old road. but in the old ruts." His AS You Like It. is taken from an old romance. The characters of his Julius Caesar are old Romans taken from Plutarch. But what borrowing! Dry bones are turned into living men. The common est materials are taken into the lam bent flame of his genius and transmit ed into airy beauty.
 Milton. too, is free borrower It is this fact indeed. that makes his verse so rich in learned reminiscence and so gorgeous with "barbaric pearl and gold" He owes much TO Shakespeare. Some critics think AIilton's Eve is bor- rowed from Shakespeare's Miranda. In the Tanning of the Shrew" occurs the line:
 As morning roses newly washed in dew.
 While Milton in "L'Allegro" speaks of
 Fresh blown roses washed in dew.
 Milton is a very mine to many. Pope is his debtor. MiIton's Smoky Sor ceress"-a woman to the waist and fair. but ending foul in many a scaIy fold yOluminOus and vast"-is made to say, They call me sin and for q sign portentous hold me; but, familiar grown, pleased and with attractive graces won the most averse." Pope sings:
 Vice is a monster of so frightful mien As to be hated needs but to be seen: But seen too oft. familiar with her face. We first endure, then pity, then embrace. Tennyson must have had in mind Milton's
 Hanging in a golden chain
 This pendent world when he wrote:
 The whole round world Is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of
 God.
 Tennyson. indeed, derives much of his exquisite imagery and delicious phras- ing from authors whose names, even. many literary men do not know.
 Pope borrows his Vital Spark idea from an old poem by Thomas FlatmGn. Byron gets his Eagle Feather" i'm age in his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" from Aeschylus, who four ished in the fifth century before our era.
 Coleridge owes his Ode to Mont Blanc" to German poem by Friedrich Brown.
 Bishop Ken is indebted for hi> thought in ''The Evening Hymn" to Sir Thomas Browne in his "ColIoquy With God"
 In his own characteristic manner Rudyard Kipling has met the ques- tion of unconscious thievery with q bit of verse which commences:
 When 'omer smote is bloomin' Tyre Ed card men sing by land and sea. And wot e thought e might require 'E went an took the same as me.
 Let Shakespeare's lines close this paper:
 I'll example you with thievery. The sun's a thief and with his great at
 traction
 Robs the vast sea: the moons an arrant
 thief,
 And her pale fire she snatches from the
 sun;
 The seas thief. whose liquid surge re-
 solves
 The moon into salt tears; the earth's s That feeds and breeds by conposture From general excrement; each things a
 thief
 -s. B. Dunn in Circle Magazine.
 ,iercy to him that shows It is the ru- = Cowper.