Where Day never shuts his eye,

Up in the broad fields of the sky :
There I suck the liquid air,

All amidst the gardens fair

Of Hesperus, and his daughters three,
That sing about the golden tree :
Along the crisped shades and bowers
Revels the spruce and jocund Spring;

The Graces, and the rosy-bosom'd Hours, ·
Thither all their bounties bring;

There eternal Summer dwells,

And west-winds with musky wing

About the cedarn alleys fling

Nard and Cassia's balmy smells.

Iris there with humid bow

Waters the odorous banks, that blow

Flowers of more mingled hue

Than her purfled scarf can shew,

And drenches with Elysian dew

(List, mortals, if your ears be true!)

Beds of hyacinth and roses,
Where young Adonis oft reposes,

Waxing well of his deep wound

In slumber soft, and on the ground

Sadly sits th' Assyrian queen;

But far above in spangled sheen
Celestial Cupid her famed son advanc'd,
Holds his dear Psyche sweet entranc'd,

After her wand'ring labours long,

Till free consent the Gods among

Make her his eternal bride,

And from her fair unspotted side

Two blissful twins are to be born,

Youth and Joy; so Jove hath sworn.

We must not pass over the beautiful monody of Lycidas, the most eloquent tribute ever paid to the memory of a departed friend; where the spirit of the indignant politician breaks

into the sorrowful verses of the poet, and draws a contrast between the simple virtues of the hero, and the worldly and selfish hypocrisy of his associates. There is no cold compliment infused into the poem, no quaint and fanciless display of elegiac sweetness; but it speaks the natural feeling of a susceptible mind unburdening its grief, and finding in the tranquillity of the outward world scenes and sounds that harmonize with its pensiveness. "Return," he cries,

Return, Sicilian Muse,

And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells, and flow'rets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks;
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,
The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine,
With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,

To strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies.

Milton sought in foreign travel to add new riches to his well-stored mind. He visited France and Italy and was received in both countries with honor by the learned and distinguished. He would have proceeded to Greece and

Sicily, but the first outbreak of the political tempest was heard over England, and he returned to share the troubles of his country, and advance those principles on which he believed her happiness to depend. He laid down the pen of the poet for that of the polemic, and employed his powerful mind and vast learning in the cause of popular institutions; and few were they who successfully maintained warfare against a man of strong moral courage armed with weapons such as his. Although during the Commonwealth he reaped some reward of his labors, and was advanced to the office of a private secretary to the Protector; yet so little was his personal consideration amongst his countrymen generally, that Whitlocke talks of him afterwards as 66 one Milton, a blind man, who was employed in translating a treaty with Sweden into Latin."

The triumph, uncertain as it was, of his political opinions was but a poor recompense for his domestic afflictions; and we have in him the painful picture of a great man struggling with neglect from the world, and disaffection and sorrow at home.

From the time of Milton's return to England until after the Restoration his poetical compositions were few; but they comprised those glorious productions, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, verses so happy, so fluent, so teeming with rich yet natural images, that no one who has read them (and to all of us they are familiar) can forget the first impression they conveyed, or does not still treasure

them in his memory. "It is impossible,”—says an author who well appreciated his subject,*—“ to conceive that the mechanism of language can be brought to a more exquisite degree of perfection. These poems differ from others as ottar of roses differs from rose water, the close packed essence from the thin diluted mixture. They are indeed not so much poems, as collections of hints, from each of which the reader is to make out a poem for himself, every epithet is a text for a canto."

Without passing hastily from the earlier to the later and nobler works of Milton, let us return to glance at the writings of those who first appeared at about the same time as himself, and served in some measure to fill up the interval that ensued.

TO DAVENANT I have already hastily alluded; he was a gallant royalist devoted to the interests of the court-in peace he was celebrated for the happy flow of his lyrics, in the civil wars he was valorous but unfortunate. Through the influence of Milton he escaped the vengeance of the conquering republicans, and exercised his versatile genius in the composition of dramas, which enjoyed a considerable but not very lasting reputation. While Davenant had many of the essentials of an amusing writer, he had not those of a great poet. His imagination wanted not only power but discipline.

* Edinburgh Review, vol. 42, page 312.

Loftiness and proportion were beyond his reach, so he contented himself with shining by fits and starts. He looked upon the rules and systems of composition as inconveniences, and thought he was original when he disregarded them. His Gondibert, which he calls an epic, met with its admirers, and he has written a long preface to prove its excellencies; but neither its metre, plot, characters, or execution have rescued it from the neglect of modern times, and it remains in our collections of English poetry, the relic of a lively but ill-regulated fancy, strewn with beauties, but deficient in that symmetry which would have rendered those beauties brighter and conspicuous.

He

ABRAHAM COWLEY was a poet of far greater pretensions. From his infancy he was gifted with the spirit of song, and had he lived in other times his reputation and his works would have been more unobscured. was attached to the royalists, but like other of his contemporaries his principles apparently succumbed to the successive ruling powers. He lived in unmolested retirement during the protectorship, and if he felt, did not give utterance to political discontent.

The beauties as well as the defects of Cowley's poetry are sufficiently obvious. He speculates, he refines, he philosophizes; he exults in ideas rather than in feelings, in the operations of the mind rather than of the passions. He indulges in metaphysical subtleties until he becomes