T Foreword HIS great Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity was composed during the last week of December, 1629. It is from the concluding lines of Milton's Sixth Elegy in Latin addressed to his friend Charles Diodati that the fact comes down to us: "And do you ask me, would you care to know The Promised Child, the King of Peace, I sing, Of God-made Flesh- an infant Deity! Glad were great angels, glad the starry throng While ruining gods crouch'd low their shrines among. Christ's birthday morn I could not choose but bring To that great Babe a numerous offering." FOREWORD What Hallam's opinion was may be cited from his Literature of Europe: "The Ode on the Nativity, far less popular than most of the poetry of Milton, is perhaps the finest in the English language. A grandeur, a simplicity, a breadth of manner, an imagination at once elevated and restrained by the subject, reign throughout it. If Pindar is a model of lyric poetry, it would be hard to name any other ode so truly Pindaric; but more has naturally been derived from the Scriptures." At that time Milton was twenty-one years of age and in his sixth academic year at Cambridge. Within somewhat less than a decade the bulk of the shorter poems including L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Comus and, greatest of all, perhaps, to the modern mind, |