to draw nourishment from the richest soil of ancient and modern litera ture. The mighty growth so stoutly rooted was at last beginning to utter sounds from its waving branches, and from the light leaves of its topmost boughs; the life which had been coursing invisibly in its channels burst forth in surpassing luxuriance of blossom and of flower. While Milton had practised such admirable reserve in early authorship, because he had “not completed to his mind the full circle of his private studies," still, he tells us himself that he felt, "by every instinct and presage of nature, which is not wont to be false, that what had emboldened other poets to their achievements might with the same diligence as they used embolden him." With all the early silence of his muse, his spirit was sustained in its high hopes by what he calls "his honest haughtiness and self-esteem of what he was or what he might be." The whole life of Milton was a life of principle, and not of impulse, or, rather, of principle controlling impulse. He was silent from a strong sense of duty, the pious conviction that the talent committed to him was to be neither rashly squandered nor basely hid. The remonstrances of an affectionate friend caused, on one occasion, some misgivings as to the tardy movings of his genius,-" a certain belatedness," as he called it,--a self-suspicion that he was suffering himself to dream away years "in studious retirement, like Endymion with the moon; these misgivings and apprehensions vanished away with the reflection— the precept of his conscience--that the great power which God had intrusted to him—a poet's creative imagination—was to be kept with a sacred reverence and religious advisement. It is in this thoughtful sense of responsibility that one of the earliest of his severely meditative sonnets is conceived:

"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom showeth.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth
That I to manhood am arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endueth.
Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow,

It shall be still in strictest measure, even

To that same lot, however mean or high,

Toward which Time leads me and the will of Heaven;

All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."

his

"but

The fruits of what I may call the rural period of Milton's life were

、

those two descriptive lyrics, "L'Allegro" and "Penseroso," which are, perhaps, better known than the rest of his short poems, and which I shall not pause on longer than to say that their charm consists in a great measure in their true picturing of actual landscape, dappled at the same time with the sunshine of a poet's fancy,-presenting, by the harmonizing light of imagination, the ploughman in the furrowed field, the blithely-singing milkmaid, the mower whetting his scythe, the shepherd seated under the hawthorn, and such familiar rural objects, together with creatures of the fancy, the cherub Contemplation soaring on golden wing, the mountain-nymphs and the wood-nymphs in their hallowed haunts, and all

Another poem of the same period is the monody "Lycidas," composed, it will be remembered, on the death by shipwreck of one of the poet's dearest friends, and on which was pronounced one of the most extraordinary of all the perverse, unimaginative, wrong-hearted, and wrongminded critical judgments which Dr. Johnson apparently delighted in when dealing with Milton's poetry. It would consume more space than I can command to scrutinize that criticism; and, therefore, I must refrain from characterizing it as I think of it, because I might seem to express myself more strongly than I could make good against such authority. It is a poem which has not only won the hearty admiration of many a thoughtful, imaginative reader of poetry, but it has even been considered by more than one trustworthy critic (among them Hallam) as a good test of a real feeling for what is peculiarly called poetry. Yet Johnson had the hardihood to say of it,-after condemning its diction as harsh, its rhymes as uncertain, the numbers unpleasing, and its want of feeling,— "In 'Lycidas' there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting, with a yet grosser fault,-its approach to impiety by the indecent mingling of trifling fictions with the most awful and sacred truths." Who could have dreamed that so bitter a rebuke was levelled at the sublime passage in which, after sundry mythological personages, by an effort of imagination appealing to the sympathetic activity of the reader's imagination, the august form of St. Peter is introduced ?— "Last come, and last did go,

The pilot of the Galilean lake:

Two massy keys he bore, of metals twain
(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain).

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake."

K

It would not, I think, be without interest to examine minutely Dr. Johnson's judgments upon this poem, and to trace them to a prejudiced and blind misapprehension of the higher aims of imagination,-a dogmatic obtuseness to the most magical spells of poetry. But too many of the poet's great works remain before me; and I can say no more on this point than that any one who desires to take home to his heart and to his intellect a just sense of the spirit of Milton's poetry, must look at it with other vision than the bleared eyes of that eminent writer who compiled the " English Dictionary."

The prime of Milton's manhood produced also the exquisite masque of "Comus." This form of dramatic composition, originally introduced from Italy, was long a favourite in England, and, being less restrained than the regular drama by rules, gave wider scope to poetical fancy. The severity of Milton's well-disciplined judgment was well fitted to check its tendency to fantastic extravagance; and there is probably no poem in the language better calculated to delight readers of almost all moods of poetic taste. It combines, in a very remarkable degree, a vivid energy of imagination, and an exuberance of all that is fanciful and beautiful in imagery and language, with a majesty of meditative philosophy diademed with the radient glory of poetry. "Comus" presents not a few beautifully-reflected lights of Milton's poetic studies. You may discover, at times, echoes, as it were, of the sweet modulations of Shakspeare's sentences,―combinations of words we are half tempted to appropriate to some of his dramas; and, again, traces of the matchless spirituality of Spenser. In the lines,

"Virtue could see to do what Virtue would

By her own radiant light, though sun and moon
Were in the flat sea sunk; and Wisdom's self
Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude;
Where, with her best nurse, Contemplation,
She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings,
That, in the various bustle of resort,
Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd.
He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit in the centre, and enjoy bright day.'

We are here reminded of the Red-Cross Knight in the "Fairy Queen,' his glittering armour making a little gleaming light in the den of Error, or of that image of surpassing beauty, surpassing Una's angel-face shining bright and making a sunshine in the shady place. One of the most beautiful passages in the poem of "Comus"-beautiful for the imaginative blending of spiritual and bodily emotions—is that in which the lady, wandering in the darkness of the forest and in the darkness

FAITH AND HOPE AND CHASTITY.

131

of her own benighted loneliness, beholds, in spirit, gleams from her unembodied guardians, Faith and Hope and Chastity, hovering round her footsteps, and at the same time, with her bodily sight, the dark cloud which had dimmed the sky brightening with sudden moonlight :

"A thousand fantasies

Begin to throng into my memory,

Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
And aëry tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
These thoughts may startle well, but not astound
The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended
By a strong-siding champion, Conscience.

Oh, welcome, pure-eyed Faith; white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!
And thou, unblemish'd form of Chastity!

I see ye visibly, and now believe

That He, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill
Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,

Would send a glistering guardian, if need were,
To keep my life and honour unassail'd.

Was I deceived? or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

I did not err: there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,

And casts a gleam over this tufted grove."

The virtue of that passage should so have its home in every heart that the recollection of it may rise up and make the brightness of any dark but moon-touched cloud brighter to the eye, and brighter still to the imagination, as it floats along the sky, the image of that light which beams from heaven upon the heart of innocence.

Much that is prophetic of the great poem of his later years may be seen in the spiritual invention of this early poem,-the vision of bad and good angels, Comus and his brutish rabble, and the attendant spirit described in the opening lines, one of

"Those immortal shapes

Of bright aërial spirits. . . . insphered
In regions mild of calm and serene air,

Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth."

I ought not to quit this exquisite poem without remarking how perfectly it illustrates the magic power of poetry to shed a glory on things which are lying in life's daily prospect. Here is a poem of a thousand lines, radiant with fancy, full of spirits of the air, and fairy spells, and

the meditations of an imaginative philosophy. And what was the occasion of it? A simple accident in the family of the Earl of Bridgewater when keeping his court at Ludlow Castle. His daughter, the Lady Alice Egerton, and her two brothers, were benighted and lost their way in Haywood Forest; and the brothers, in attempting to explore their path, left their sister alone in a tract of country inhabited by a boorish peasantry. When the fair one's heart was throbbing in the lonely wood, how little could she have dreamed that a poet's words were to win for her brighter and more enduring honour than aught that wealth or heraldry could give!

But the most distinct foreshadowing of the immortal epic poem is given in a poem shorter and earlier than "Comus," the "Hymn on the Nativity." It has very much the sound of "Paradise Lost" set to a lyrical measure. When listening to the line closing one of the stanzas,

"The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,"

I fancy I can hear it in the "Paradise Lost," composed some forty years after, reverberating after that lapse of years in a passage which is the very echo of it :

"The thunder,

Wing'd with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps has spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless deep."

The happy

The tranquil hours at Horton were drawing to a close. household was broken by the death of the poet's mother. It is a trait of tenderness in the character of one whose character we are too apt to regard as all severity, that it was not until, to borrow the words of the Psalmist, "he went heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother,” that the wish for foreign travel was indulged by Milton. Having, by the poems already mentioned, acquired reputation as a poet, in his thirtieth year he left England to travel to lands whose ancient glory was still hanging over the south of Europe. It would be interesting to follow him in imagination as he roamed through classic lands, a young enthusiast in the full flush of fresh poetic genius, the strength of admirable scholarship, and in the prime of manly beauty, with not a wrinkle by the cares which after a few years seamed his brows,—to stand with him in the presence of Grotius, then an ambassador to the court of France, --and, with still deeper interest, to accompany him at Florence, visiting Galileo old, a prisoner of the Inquisition, and fast sinking under his burdens into the grave. How must the young poet's heart, full as it ever was to overflowing with the passion for freedom,—the single