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impossible to speak in terms of too high admiration. The eulogy pronounced upon it by Dr. Symmons, is at once enthusiastic and discriminate: "Among the compositions of our own country," he says, "it certainly stands unrivalled for its affluence in poetic imagery and diction; and, as an effort of the creative power, it can be paralleled only by the muse of Shakspeare, by whom in this respect it is possibly exceeded. With Shakspeare the whole, excepting some rude outlines or suggestions of the story, is the immediate emanation of his own mind; but Milton's erudition precluded him from this extreme originality, and was perpetually supplying him with thoughts, which would sometimes obtain the preference from his judgment, and would sometimes be mistaken for his own property by his invention. Original, however, he is; and, of all the sons of song, inferior in this requisite of genius to Shakspeare alone."

In the only criticism of a particular passage upon which Dr. S. ventures, he is by no means so felicitous. He selects one of the most charming passages in the drama-that in which Comus describes the lady singing the echo song:

How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled.

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After justifying the preceding images he adds, "But it is surely a transgression, which stands in need of pardon, when proceeding a step further and accumulating personifications, we invest this raven-down with life and make it to smile." It is surprising that a man of the taste and perception of Dr. Symmons should have fallen into such an error. The application of the term to smile to the down of the imaginary bird, smoothed by the cadences of the music, involves no additional personification. Innumerable instances might be adduced from the highest ancient and modern poets, in which, without personification, and with a strict similarity of meaning, the surface of the sea is said to smile or to

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frown under the sunshine or the passing shadows of clouds.

It is indeed a dangerous exercise to criticise this matchless production; it stands conspicuous among the brightest productions of human genius, by a refined and exquisite purity of sentiment which, even in a strictly imaginative range of thought, may be designated as intense spirituality; and the union of this ethereal spirit with the very genius of harmony completes the enchantment of the poem. The remote and heterogenous reading indicated by its allusions still further increases the wonder with which we peruse it. It has ever been matter of amazement that the Comus could have been produced by any one at the age of twenty-five; this, however, is not the only fact that proves the strange precocity of Milton's mind. It is scarcely more surprising that this drama should have been produced at that age than that one of the finest of his Latin poems should have been written at the age of nineteen. I refer to an Academic exercise composed to oblige one of the fellows of his college, and entitled Naturam non pati senium, its purpose being to reply to those who held the notion that the world was liable to the decays of old age. Several of Milton's biographers mention that this subject was probably suggested by a work published in the preceding year under the title of " An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, by George Hakewill, D.D., and Archdeacon of Surrey, 1627.”*

Of the former production, Mr. Macaulay, in his brilliant article on Milton, first published in the Edinburgh Review, remarks, that "Comus is framed on the model of the Italian masque, as the Samson is formed on the model of the Greek tragedy. It is certainly the noblest performance of the kind which exists in any language."}

* Similar views were maintained some years afterwards by Dr. South, a bitter enemy of Milton, in a Sermon from Eccl. vii. 10-"Say not thou, what is the cause that the former days were better than these?"

The Lycidas has been the subject of a contest so fierce as to leave it difficult to conceive that either party is altogether in the right. "In this poem," says Johnson, "there is no

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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: whatever images it can supply, are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind." . . . . “Nothing can less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how a shepherd has lost his companion, &c." Nay, he even goes so far as to say, Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known its author." Sir Egerton Brydges, on the contrary, maintains that "so far from deserving the character applied to it by Johnson, the language is throughout imaginative and picturesque, and the rhythm harmonious and enchanting. There is no poem in which the epithets are more beautiful, more appropriate, or more fresh; they are like the diction of no predecessor, but of some of the occasional passages of rural description by Shakspere in his happiest moods. But it will be asked what invention there is in this poem? There is invention in the epithets; in the combinations, in the descriptions, in the apostrophes, in the visionary parts of the poem, in the sorrows, the predictions, and the consolations: in all those associations which none but a rich and poetical mind produces." Dr. Warton goes still further, and insists that the admiration or dislike of this poem is an infallible test whether a reader has or has not a poetical taste: . . . . that he who is not enraptured with it can have no genuine idea of poetry.

The truth probably lies in a medium between the splenetic prejudice of Johnson and the enthusiasm of his more partial biographers. That there is a rhapsodical wildness about the Lycidas, few will deny; and it must be further admitted that it is rendered less intelligible to many by the affluence of classical allusion with which it is perhaps overloaded. In

deed the embarras de richesses was the necessary condition of such a mind as Milton's. With so vast a repository of knowledge, and with a faculty of association so importunately lively, his great difficulty must have been to insulate his thoughts from a throng of classical or extraneous associations, to discern an indorsement on many which otherwise he would mistake for his own, and to eliminate those references which, however familiar to his own mind, would be lost upon the multitude of his less privileged readers. In spite, however, of this splendid defect, it is difficult to imagine how Dr. Johnson could have read such passages as the following, and then attribute the admiration of Lycidas to the blinded partiality of the reader:

Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more;

For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,

Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor:

So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed:

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:

So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,

Through the dear might of Him that walk'd the waves;

Where other groves, and other streams along,

With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the saints above,
In solemn troops, and sweet societies,
That sing, and singing, in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.

It is remarkable that the Comus came out without a name, and that of Lycidas, which was written at the request of his college, as a monody upon one of its fellows, who was wrecked and drowned in the Irish Sea, the authorship was only indicated by the initials J. M.

Passing by the masque entitled Arcades, which is said to have been presented at Harefield, before Alice, Countess

Dowager of Derby, and acted by her own grandchildren, we next have to notice the poems entitled L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, which are generally supposed to have been written about the same time; that is, during Milton's residence at Horton. The genial charm of these two poems appeared to have thawed for a moment the icy prejudice of Johnson himself. He pronounced them two noble efforts of imagination; and observes, with great discrimination, "The author's design is not what Theobald has remarked, merely to show how objects derive their colours from the mind, by representing the operation of the same things upon the gay and melancholy temper, or upon the same man as he is differently disposed; but rather, how among the successive variety of appearances every disposition of mind takes hold on those by which it may be gratified.

"The cheerful man hears the lark in the morning; the pensive man hears the nightingale in the evening. The cheerful man sees the cock strut, and hears the horn and hounds echo in the woods; then walks 'not unseen' to observe the glory of the rising sun, or listen to the singing milk-maid, and view the labours of the ploughman, and the mower; then casts his eyes about him over scenes of smiling plenty; and looks up to the distant tower, the residence of some fair inhabitant; thus he pursues rural gaiety, through a day of labour, or of play, and delights himself at night with the fanciful narratives of superstitious ignorance.

“The pensive man at one time walks unseen, to muse at midnight; and at another, hears the sullen curfew. If the weather drives him home, he sits in a room lighted only by glowing embers; or by a lonely lamp outwatches the north star, to discover the habitation of separate souls, and varies the shades of meditation by contemplating the magnificent or pathetic scenes of tragic and epic poetry. When the morning comes, a morning gloomy with rain and wind, he walks into the dark trackless woods, falls asleep by some murmuring water, and with melancholy enthusiasm expects

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