Time would fail us to speak, as they deserve, of Comus, that finest compound of the pastoral and the play, with its high moralisings and Shaksperean imagery; of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, with their delicious contrast and dancing measures; of the Hymn on Christ's Nativity, which, slow and solemn as a charmed river, moves around the awful sanctities of its theme; of Lycidas, wailing so melodiously over "That fatal and perfidious bark, Built in the eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark, Which laid so low that sacred head of thine;" of the Sonnets, rising in climax, from the rugged simplicity of those of Cyriack Skinner, up to the grand swelling peal (as of a Sonnet soaring out of itself into some higher form of verse) of that On the late Massacre in Piemont; or of his graceful Greek, Italian, and Latin verses and versicles. We have not said enough to exhaust our own admiration, but we have pointed again—with however feeble a finger—to fountains of song which no impurity defiles, and which are as fresh and full this hour as when they were first opened by the hand of the Master-spirit. MISCELLANIES :— At a Vacation Exercise in the College Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakspeare |