power over language, in its beauty and majesty, his mastery of form and of verse, its music and loveliness, its resources and charms, dignity, austerity, and awe, form the most marked distinctions of Milton."-W. M. Rossetti.

"Milton's hymns rolled with the slowness of a measured song and the gravity of a declamation.”—Taine.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

"High on a throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,

Or where the gorgeous East, with richest hand,
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit raised

To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue

Vain war with Heaven, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displayed."

-Paradise Lost.

"The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the archéd roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathéd spell

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell."
-On the Morning of Christ's Nativity.

"But let my due feet never fail

To walk the studious cloister's pale,
And love the high embowèd roof,
With antic pillars massy proof

And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light."

-Il Penseroso.

3. Love of Natural Beauty-Picturesqueness.Certain critics have called Milton a poet of books rather than

of nature; but this judgment is sustained neither by the majority of commentators nor by his works. In a letter addressed to Diodati, in 1637, Milton writes: "What God has resolved concerning me, I know not, but this I know at least-He has instilled into me a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labour, as the fables have it, is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpine as I am wont to seek day and night for this idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things."

"There is a more potent and lasting charm in Milton's description of the beautiful than in the description of the sublime. The art of landscape poetry, I take it, consists in this: the choice and description of such actual images of external nature as are capable of being grouped and colored by a dominant idea or feeling. Of this art the most perfect masters are Milton and Tennyson. . Not less remarkable is the

identity of spirit in Tennyson and Milton in their delicate yet wholesome sympathy with Nature, their perception of the relation of her moods and aspects to the human heart." -Henry Van Dyke.

"His description of nature shows a free and bold hand. With a few strong and delicate touches he impresses, as it were, his own mind on the scenes which he would describe, and kindles the imagination of the gifted reader to clothe them with the same radiant hues under which they appeared to him. . We have thought so much of Milton's strength and sublimity that we have ceased to recognize is by nature the supreme lover of beauty. No poems possess more pure love of beauty than Il Penseroso,' 'L'Allegro' and other of Milton's early poems."-Edward Dowden.

that he

"He does look at nature, but he sees her through books. Natural impressions are received from without, but always in those forms of beautiful speech in which the poets of all ages have clothed them. . . Milton's attitude toward Nature

is .

that of a poet who feels its total influences too powerfully to dissect it. He is not concerned to register the facts and phenomena of nature but to convey the impressions they make on a sensitive soul.”—Mark Pattison.

"However his poems are involved, Milton has always a simple motive. And this is one reason why children as well as others understand and have pleasure in them. The picturesqueness of the scenes, the clear-cut vivid outlines of the things described and this is also a constant excellence of Milton, though he sometimes wilfully spoils it by digression-is also a source of delight to young and old."-Stopford Brooke.

"We hear the pealing organ, but the incense on the altars is also there, and the statues of the gods are ranged around. The ear indeed predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately affected, and because the language of music blends more immediately with and forms a more natural accompaniment to the variable and indefinite associations of ideas conveyed by words. But where the associations of the imagination are not the principal thing, the individual object is given by Milton with equal force and beauty. He refines on his descriptions of beauty, loading sweets on sweets till the sense aches with them. He describes objects of

which he has only read in books with the vividness of actual observation. He makes words tell as pictures.”—William

Hazlitt.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

"Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;
Listen for dear honour's sake,

Goddess of the silver lake;

Listen and save,

Listen and appear to us,

In name of great Oceanus;

By all the nymphs that nightly dance
Upon thy streams with wily glance,
Rise, rise, and heave thy rosy head
From thy coral-paven bed,

Till thou our summons answered have

Listen and save."-Comus.

"On either side

Acanthus and each odorous bushy shrub

Fenced up the verdant wall; each beauteous flower,
Iris all hues, roses, and jessamin

Reared high their flourish'd heads between, and wrought
Mosaic; under foot the violet,

Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay

Broidered the ground, more coloured than with stone

Of costliest emblem."-Paradise Lost.

66
"Betwixt them lawns or level downs and flocks

Grazing the tender herb were interposed,

Or palmy hillock; or the flowery lap

Of some irrigous valley spread her store,
Flowers of all hue and without thorn the rose ;
Another side, umbrageous grots and caves
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine
Lays forth her purple grape and creeps
Luxuriant; meanwhile murmuring waters fall
Down the slope hills dispersed, or in the lake,
That to the fringèd bank with myrtle crowned
Her crystal mirror holds, their streams unite.
The birds their quire apply; airs, vernal airs,
Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune
The trembling leaves."-Paradise Lost.

4. Vastness-Amplitude.-This quality is nearly related to the majesty of Milton's style, already discussed, and is continually found in connection with it; and yet the two

qualities are not identical; for we may find numerous passages where the treatment is grand and sonorous while the element of spaciousness is not present. On the other hand, however, we seldom if ever have spaciousness without grandeur. "His is the large utterance of the early gods. He showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction. . . . He loved phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like Teneriffe or Atlas.. In reading 'Paradise Lost' one has a feeling of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean ; thunder mutters around the horizon; and if the scene changes, it is with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. There are no such vistas and avenues of verse as his. In reading 'Paradise Lost' one has a feeling of spaciousness which no other poet gives. Whatever he touches swells and towers."—Lowell.

"Milton's delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery into worlds where only imagination can travel. His great excellence is amplitude. . . . He had accustomed his imagination to unrestrained indulgence, and his conceptions therefore were extensive."-Samuel Johnson.

"Milton needs the grand and infinite; he lavishes them. His eyes are only content in limitless space, and he produces colossuses to fill it. Such is Satan wallowing on the surges of the livid sea. Milton's hell is vast and vague.

He wanted a great and flowing verse, an ample and sounding strophe, vast periods of fourteen and four-and-twenty lines. His genius multiplies grand landscapes and colossal apparitions."-Taine.

"Its sign [that of Milton's genius] is strength, but strength seraphic; .. a power of sustained flight, of far-reach