Milton died in college on the 6th of December 1672, and is buried in the Cathedral. He wrote a striking play, The City Match, 1639. Jasper Mayne was celebrated for his facetious humour, of which some very vulgar specimens have been preserved, and he was a favourite of Charles II. In one department of poetry, however, there is something else to chronicle than decline. The reign of Charles I., so unillustrious in most branches of literature, produced a very fine school of lyric poets. Among these JOHN MILTON was easily the greatest, and between the years 1631 and 1637 he contributed to English literature about two thousand of the most exquisite, the most perfect, the most consummately executed verses which are to be discovered in the language. This apparition of Milton at Horton, without associates, without external stimulus, Virtue seeing "to do what Virtue would, by his own radiant light," this is one of the most extraordinary phenomena which we encounter in our history. Milton was born in 1608, and proceeded to Cambridge in 1625, where he remained until 1632. During these seven years the eastern University was one of the main centres of poetical animation in the country; several true poets and a host of poetasters were receiving their education there. The poems of Dr. Donne, handed about in MS., were universally admired, and were the objects of incessant emulation. Of all this environment, happily but surprisingly, not a trace is to be found on Milton. We find, indeed, the evidences of a loving study of Shakespeare and of the ancients, and in his earliest work a distinct following of those scholars of Spenser, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, who had been prominent figures at Cambridge just before Milton came into residence. What drew the young Milton to Giles Fletcher it is not difficult to divine. That writer's Christ's Victory and Triumph had been a really important religious poem, unequal in texture, but rising at its highest to something of that pure magnificence of imagination which was to be Milton's aim and glory. Phineas Fletcher had composed a Scriptural poem, the Apollyonists, which was published in 1627. This was a fragment on the fall of the rebel angels, and Milton must have been greatly struck with it, for he paid it the compliment of borrowing considerably from it when he came to write Paradise Lost. When, at the close of 1629, Milton began his Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, he was still closely imitating the form of these favourites of his, the Fletchers, until the fifth stanza was reached, and then he burst away in a magnificent measure of his own, pouring forth that hymn which carried elaborate lyrical writing higher than it had ever been taken before in England. But, gorgeous as was the Nativity Ode, it could not satisfy the scrupulous instinct of Milton. Here were fire, melody, colour; what, then, was lacking? Well, purity of style and that "Doric delicacy" of which Milton was to be the prototype-these were lacking. We read the Nativity Ode with rapture, but sometimes with a smile. Its language is occasionally turbid, incongruous, even absurd. We should be sorry that "the chill marble seems to sweat," and that "the sun in bed. . . pillows his chin How soone hash Time the surtle theefs of youth Stolng on his wing my three twenteth yeere my hesting days fly on with full careers. but my late spring late spring no bud or blesson ? shew th 2 Perhapps my semblancs might decegle y & Stuth that I lo manhood, arried, to neve yes com inward ripenesse tosh much lesse, appear th that some more hymily happie spirits 62 4 tesse or more, or soone or slow shall be still in strickest theaters Even to that same lot however meant or high woch Tyme leads me, & the will of Reaver all is if I have grace of these for my great taff/2" Eye oy/24 62% toward Milton's Sonnet on his Twenty-third Birthday (From the original MS. in Trinity College Library) How soone hath Time the suttle theefe of Youth & inward ripenesse doth much lesse appeare Yet be it lesse or more, or soone or slow upon an orient wave," if these were not like the tricks of a dear and valued friend, oddities that seem part of his whole exquisite identity. Such excrescences as these we have to condone in almost all that we find delightful in seventeenth-century literature. We may easily slip into believing these conceits and flatnesses to be in themselves beautiful; but this is a complacency which is to be avoided, and we should rather dwell on such a stanza of the Nativity Ode as xix., in which not a word, not a syllable, mars the distinguished perfection of the poem, but in which every element combines to produce a solemn, harmonious, and imposing effect. The oracles are dumb, No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance, or breathèd spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. The evolution of Milton continued, though in 1630 we find him (in the Passion) returning to the mannerisms of the Fletchers. But, in the Sonnet on his Twenty-third Birthday he is adult at last, finally dedicated, as a priest, to the sacred tasks of the poetic life, and ready to abandon all "the earthly grossness" which dragged down the literature of his age. And next we hear him put the golden trumpet to his lips and blow the melodies of At a Solemn Music, in which no longer a trace of the "metaphysical" style mars the lucid perfection of utterance, but in which words arranged with consummate art summon before us a vision not less beatific than is depicted by Dante in his Paradiso or by Fra Angelico in his burning frescoes. Beyond these eight-and-twenty lines, no poet, and not Milton himself, has proceeded. Human language, at all events in English, has never surpassed, in ecstasy of spiritual elevation or in pure passion of melody, this little canzonet, which was, in all probability, the first-fruits of Milton's retirement to Horton. AT A SOLEMN MUSIC. Blest pair of sirens, pledges of heaven's joy, Sphere-born, harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse, Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne To Him that sits thereon, With saintly shout, and solemn jubilee ; Touch their immortal harps of golden wires, With those just spirits that wear victorious palms, Singing everlastingly : That we on earth, with undiscording voice, May rightly answer that melodious noise, As once we did, till disproportion'd sin Jarr'd against nature's chime, and with harsh din To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd In perfect diapason, whilst they stood. Oh, may we soon again renew that song, And keep in tune with heaven, till God, ere long To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light! In the sylvan Buckinghamshire village, "far from the noise of town, and shut up in deep retreats," Milton abandoned himself to study and reflection. He was weighed upon, even thus early, by a conviction of his sublime calling; he he waited for the seraphim of the Eternal Spirit to touch his lips with the hallowed fire of inspiration, and he was neither idle nor restless, neither ambitious nor indifferent. He read with extreme eagerness, rising early and retiring late; he made himself master of all that could help him towards his mysterious vocation in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. To mark the five years of his stay at Horton, he produced five immortal poems, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus, Lycidas, all essentially lyrical, though two of them assume the semidramatic form of the pageant or masque, a species of highly artificial poetry to which Ben Jonson and Campion had lent their prestige in the preceding age. Frontispiece to Milton's Poems, 1645 "What Milton thought when this engraving of himself was shown him, we can only guess. But, instead of having it cancelled, he let it go forth with the volume,-only taking his revenge by a practical joke at the engraver's expense. He offered him some lines of Greek verse to be engraved ornamentally under the portrait; and these lines the did innocently engrave, little thinking what they meant. translation of them may run thus :- poor artist An English That an unskilful hand had carved this print By DAVID MASSON, M.A., LL.D.) The ineffable refinement and dignity of these poems found a modest publicity in 1645. But the early poetry of Milton captured little general favour, Title-page of "Comus," First Edition and one small edition of it sufficed for nearly thirty years. Few imitated or were influenced by Milton's lyrics, and until the eighteenth century was well advanced they were scarcely read. Then their celebrity began, and from Gray and Collins onward, every English poet of eminence has paid his tribute to Il Penseroso or to Lycidas. If we examine closely the diction of these Horton poems, we shall find that in almost all of them (in Comus least) a mannerism which belonged to the age faintly dims their purity of style. Certain little tricks we notice are Italianisms, and the vogue of the famous Marino, author of the Adone, who had died while Milton was at Cambridge, was responsible, perhaps, for some thing. But, on the whole, lyrical poetry in this country has not reached a higher point, in the reflective and impersonal order, than is reached in the central part of L'Allegro and in the Spirit's epilogue to Comus. THE EPILOGUE TO "COMUS." Spir. To the ocean now I fly, All amidst the gardens fair Of Hesperus, and his daughters three That sing about the golden tree : Along the crispèd shades and bowers Revels the spruce and jocund Spring; |