was in reality gifted with an extraordinary wealth of feeling and sympathy for everything human. Thus L'Allegro and Il Penseroso represent two alternate states of soul familiar to Milton as to all men.

and lead the dancing troop

O'er the smooth enamel'd green

Where no print of step hath been.21

In particular, the poems are full of amorous and more than half voluptuous feeling. Milton could muse in his youth in this wise:

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair? 22

21 Arcades, 11. 65, 84-85

22 Lycidas, 11. 64-69.

Nor was it any Puritan poet who saw the exuberance of Nature as Comus celebrates it in that astounding passage in which we feel in full maturity that peculiar love for Mother Earth already suggested in the Latin poems: a love internal, so to speak, that describes but little, but consists in a sort of sympathy for the very growth of all beings, as though Milton recognized in himself the same generous forces as in vegetation and the luxuriance of animal generation:

O foolishness of men! that lend their ears
To those budge doctors of the Stoic fur,

And fetch their precepts from the Cynic tub,
Praising the lean and sallow Abstinence.
Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth,
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks,
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,

But all to please, and sate the curious taste?
And set to work millions of spinning worms,

That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk
To deck her sons; and that no corner might

Be vacant of her plenty, in her own loins

She hutched th' all-worshipp'd ore, and precious gems,
To store her children with: if all the world

Should in a pet of temp'rance feed on pulse,

Drink the clear stream, and nothing wear but frieze,
Th' All-giver would be unthank'd, would be unpraised,
Not half his riches known, and yet despised;
And we should serve him as a grudging master,

As a penurious niggard of his wealth;

And live like Nature's bastards, not her sons,

Who would be quite surcharged with her own weight,

And strangled with her waste fertility;

Th' earth cumbered, and the wing'd air dark'd with plumes,

The herds would over-multitude their lords,

The sea o'erfraught would swell, and th' unsought diamonds
Would so emblaze the forehead of the deep,

And so bestud with stars, that they below
Would grow inured to light, and come at last
To gaze upon the sun with shameless brows. 23

Out of this feeling for Nature, an idea is arising which will play a great part in Milton's philosophy. Nature comes from God; natural instincts are good; to follow them is to fulfil God's will. The line

Th' All-giver would be unthank'd, would be unpraised

contains in germ the thought which will later be clearly expressed in

Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain
But our destroyer, foe to God and man? 24

In this feeling for Nature is the ultimate source of Milton's pantheistic ideas. He will never admit that Nature, or matter, or the flesh are evil. His deepest sympathy goes out to all that grows, reproduces itself, spreads out into beautiful rich shapes. He loves Nature in a twofold way: through his senses for her external beauty, and through this inner feeling of sympathy with Life.

Comus, speaking thus, is a part of Milton's soul, even as Satan will be later. But, ruling high above these deeper powers of feeling, which are but half-awakened as yet, sits Reason. Comus is one long praise of temperance, self-mastery, chastity. I have already pointed out the strictly non-Christian character of this value given to chastity. There is little that is Christian about Comus. Chastity has a value of its own, and gives powers in the supernatural world by its own magic forces:

23 Comus, ll. 706-36. In the Times Literary Supplement for January 19, 1922, Dr. Smart points out a curious source for this passage in Randolph. But the feeling as well as the poetry have been put in by Milton.

24 Paradise Lost, IV, 748-49.

'Tis chastity, my brother, chastity:

She that has that, is clad in complete steel,
And like a quiver'd nymph with arrows keen
May trace huge forests, and unharbour'd heaths,
Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds,
Where, through the sacred rays of chastity,
No savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer
Will dare to soil her virgin purity;

Yea, there where very desolation dwells,

By grots, and caverns shagg'd with horrid shades,
She may pass on with unblench'd majesty,
Be it not done in pride, or in presumption.
Some say no evil thing that walks by night,
In fog, or fire, by lake, or moorish fen,
Blue meager hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost,
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
No goblin, or swart faery of the mine,

Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity.25

Curious as this passage is, the following, woven round a few sentences of Plato's Phado, is more important still, as showing the beginnings of some of Milton's later and most original conceptions:

So dear to heav'n is saintly chastity,

That when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lacky her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream, and solemn vision,
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on th' outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,

And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal: but when lust,
By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,
Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
The soul grows clotted by contagion,

25 Comus, ll. 420-37.

Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose
The divine property of her first being.
Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp
Oft seen in charnel vaults, and sepulchres,
Ling'ring and sitting by a new-made grave,
As loath to leave the body that it loved,
And linked itself by carnal sensualty
To a degenerate and degraded state.20

As yet the poet is only playing with Platonic conceptions. But here is the idea that in certain circumstances the body becomes soul,

And turns . . . by degrees to the soul's essence,

Till all be made immortal. . .

...

What is here an exception in favor of chastity will become later, in the poet's mind, the normal rule: body and spirit will become one, will all become immortal; all distinction between them will disappear. Here already the essential distinction is weakened: the body can become spirit through chastity; the soul materializes itself through lust. No impassable barrier separates the two orders. It is typical of Milton's mind and temperament that it is through meditation on sensual desire that he comes to the conception of the fundamental unity between body and soul, no doubt because of the intensity of desire he felt in himself, possessing him. We shall see how the passionate introspection which followed his unhappy marriage made the idea grow in him, and how one of the most important conceptions of his philosophy thus came inevitably from his temperament.

But this high appreciation of chastity was to remain with him to the end. The fall, in a certain sense, was always to be lust, "the deed of darkness." Only, when 26 Ibid., 11. 453-75.