But, to be

most perfect of Milton's compositions. enjoyed, it must be read as a poem, for the sake of these excellencies, and not as a drama representing anything probable or possible in human life, under any imaginable circumstances, even admitting the preternatural machinery which the poet has introduced to exalt a simple incident into tragic dignity. For, were Comus and his crew, Sabrina and her nymphs, as real as the lady herself, the elder and the younger brother, but especially the attendant spirit, would not have discoursed so learnedly, nor acted so dilatorily (though each may have felt all that each is made to express), in a crisis of such agonizing suspense and imminent peril to the captured lady, after they knew her situation. With this drawback (if it be one, except in reference to a stage exhibition), Comus may claim the eulogium which a critic of the purest taste, the late Dr. Aikin, has passed upon it. He says:-"The poem possesses great beauty of versification, varying from the gayest Anacreontics to the most majestic and sonorous heroics. On the whole, if an example were required of a work made up of the very essence of poetry, perhaps none of equal length, in any language, could be produced, answering this character in so high a degree as the Masque of Comus." It may be added, that here Milton first tried his hand in blank verse, and proved himself master of the whole diapason of rhythmical tones and cadences, through all their implications. Two or three brief extracts, without comment, will test the quality of the philosophy, as well as the poetry of this work :

"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-to ruffled, and sometimes impaired.
He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day :
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts,
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.

"How charming is divine philosophy!

Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose;
But musical as is Apollo's lute,

And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets,
Where no crude surfeit reigns.

"Against the threats

Of malice, or of sorcery, or that power
Which erring men call chance, this I hold firm:
Virtue may be assail'd, but never hurt;
Surprised by unjust force, but not enthrall'd;
Yea, even that which mischief meant most harm,
Shall, in the happy trial, prove most glory;
But evil on itself shall back recoil,

And mix no more with goodness; when, at last,
Gather'd like scum, and settled to itself,
It shall be in eternal restless change
Self-fed and self-consumed: if this fail,
The pillar'd firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble."

Is not this Plato himself speaking in English, as pure and beautiful, almost, as his own fine Greek?

Our author's Sonnets are of very unequal, and some of very indifferent merit, though the principal fault of the least excellent is the uncouth intertexture of the lines, the ruggedness of the rhythm, and, in some instances, the barbarity of the rhymes. The first is addressed to the nightingale, his favourite bird. Her

he has celebrated in every one of his finest poems, and often in strains which, if the chauntress herself could have heard and understood, she would surely, like her sister in Strada's fable, have endeavoured to rival, till she broke her heart in the conflict, and fell dead upon the poet's harp-strings. Among the best of these sonnets, that On the Religious Memory of Mrs. Catherine Thomson is (in the beautiful phrase of Coleridge) "beautiful exceedingly; "—the canonization in verse of a glorified saint. That On the late Massacre in Piedmont contains a tremendous malediction on the persecutors of those mountaineer-martyrs,

"who kept thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones."

Nor must the sonnet on his blindness be overlooked. Though severely simple in style, and remarkably abrupt in the cadences, it is, in quiet grandeur of sentiment, one of the noblest records of human feeling at once subdued and sublimed by resignation to the divine will. Milton is never more himself than when he speaks of himself. Here we are let into the inmost sanctuary of his mind, and hearken, as it were, to the invisible spirit there communing with itself, amidst the darkness of external nature, till light from heaven, suddenly breaking in upon him, reveals God in his "kingly state," obeyed equally by those who do and those who suffer his will.

"thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

In many of his works, both prose and verse, Milton had avowed his purpose to give, to contemporaries and generations to come, an heroic poem ; but he was "long choosing and beginning late." The delay was of no

one.

disadvantage, for the choice which he had almost made, even in middle life, would hardly have proved a wise In his Epistle to Manso he expressly names his hero, Prince Arthur, and his theme, the triumphs of the British patriot over the pagan Saxons. Had he prosecuted this subject, we should, indeed, have had-what is yet a desideratum—a national epic, but the great poem which we have, and of the glory of which time cannot rob us while we are a nation, would verily have been Paradise Lost to our literature, and never to be Regained, for it could never have existed. It was a happy escape for the poet himself, as well as for his country, that his discretion ran not aground on the shoals, nor split on the rocks of the former obscure and dangerous channel, with its alternate shallows, and whirlpools, and fathomless depths, utterly unnavigable by vessels of such burthen as that which bore Milton and his fortunes to the haven of immortality in song. His "heaven-born Muse," which "had angelic wings, and fed on manna," could neither have condescended to the frivolities, nor run riot in the extravagances of romance. He could neither have followed the volatile and fantastic Ariosto, the graceful and voluptuous Tasso, nor the exuberant and imaginative Spenser; though, like Cowley and Pope, he caught early inspiration from the perusal of the Faerie Queene, whose author has, probably, helped to make more poets than any other of our countrymen. Gothic poetry, such as that in which Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table require to be celebrated, must resemble Gothic architecture. To magnificence of dimension must be added multiplicity of detail, and to grandeur of outline efflorescence of embellishment; the minutest appendages to the mightiest proportions, yet the little in nowise diminishing the effect

of the great, nor the intricate complexity of parts the august and awful spectacle of the whole. But, after all, the perfection of manual art, the consummation of architectural glory, exemplified in the Parthenon of Athens, was a structure far different ;—at once simple in form, in symmetry so exquisite, and so sublime in elevation, that it appeared intellectually grand; and, even through the eye, filling the mind, rather than beguiling the sense, with silent, gradual, soul-expanding admiration. The powers of Phidias would have been as uncongenially employed in constructing a cathedral of the twelfth century, as those of Milton on an epic poem from the legends of romance; how rich, abundant, and pliable soever for the purposes of heroic song these might be.

In Paradise Lost, Milton has realised the dreams of his youth, the meditations of long years in mature life, while he was far otherwise occupied, and the revelations of his old age, when, "though fallen on evil days and evil tongues "_" in darkness, and with dangers compass'd round, and solitude,❞—he yet was visited "nightly" by the "heavenly Muse," or "when morn purpled the east," and was thus emboldened "to celebrate, in glorious and lofty hymns, the throne and equipage of God's almightiness" (to use his own words), "and what He works and what He suffers to be wrought with high providence in the church :"-" teaching over the whole book of sanctity and virtue, through all the instances of example, with such delight to those especially of soft and delicious temper, who will not so much as look on Truth herself, unless she be elegantly drest."

The plan of Paradise Lost is so comprehensive as to include all that can, from obscure allusions in Sacred Writ, be conjectured respecting what came to pass in heaven and in hell before time began,-the creation of