Note 82 — X. COMENIUS. (1592-1671).

“What do you learn from ‘Paradise Lost’? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery book? Something new, something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upward—a step ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge from first to last carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth; whereas the very first step in power is a flight, is an ascending into another element where earth is forgotten.” I have met with this as a quotation from De Quincey.