they could not be found combined into an uniform and unbroken texture, nor with the same uniformity of elevated and spiritual thought. In almost all precedent poets they are patches. That Milton was minutely familiar with the poems of all his celebrated predecessors is sufficiently evident; but so far as he used them, he only used them as ingredient particles. Spenser is rich and picturesque, but Milton has a character distinct from him. Milton's texture is more massy: the gold is weightier: he has a haughtier solemnity.

CHAPTER II.

CRITICAL ACCOUNT OF MILTON'S COLLEGE POETRY.

THOUGH there were many things which had a tendency to make Milton in his boyhood and first youth discontented with the social institutions of his country, as they then displayed themselves in all their abuses; yet the relics of former greatness still remained in such preservation as to give full force to the imagination: the names, the feudal history, the trophies of former magnificence, were all fresh. Though king James was mean, pedantic, and corrupt, king Charles had a royal spirit, and a benevolent, accomplished mind : he loved literature and the arts, and had subtle, if not grand, abilities. At this time, therefore, Milton's love of monarchical and aristocratical splendor was contending with his puritanic education, and his personal hatred of arbitrary power: his rich imagination and his stern judgment were at variance: his early poems rarely, if ever, touch upon sectarianism: Spenser and Shakspeare, courts, castles, and theatres, did not agree with Calvinistic rigours and formalities.

Milton's enthusiasm was, as Warton observes, the enthusiasm of the poet, not of the puritan.

At this time he had more of description and less of abstract thought: that sublime elevation of axiomatic wisdom was not yet reached; but from his earliest years he appears to have been conversant and delighted with the tone and expressions of the Hebrew poetry: his grand and inimitable Hymn on the Nativity' proves this. In that hymn is every poetical perfection, mingled with a sort of prophetic solemnity, which fills us with a religious awe: the nervous harmony and climax of the lines are also admirable. It was written in 1629, when he was in his twenty-first year, probably as a college-exercise. Mark this

stanza :

No war, or battle's sound,

Was heard the world around;

The idle spear and shield were high uphung;
The hooked chariot stood

Unstain'd with human blood;

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;
And kings sat still with awful eye,
As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

Or these two stanzas :

The oracles are dumb;

No voice, or hideous hum,

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving :
Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

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

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting genius is with sighing sent:
With flower-inwoven tresses torn

The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. Dr. Joseph Warton observes here: "attention is irresistibly awakened and engaged by the air of solemnity and enthusiasm that reigns in this stanza and some that follow. Such is the power of true poetry, that one is almost inclined to believe the superstition real."

I cannot doubt that this hymn was the congenial prelude of that holy and inspired imagination which produced the Paradise Lost,' nearly forty years afterwards.

I am not aware that our young bard had any prototype in this sort of ode: the form, the matter, the imagery, the language, the rhythm, are all new. Milton seems himself in the state of wonder and awe of the shepherds, and of all those whom he describes as affected by this miracle. The trembling, the fervour, the blaze, is true inspiration. In this state, the poet, visited by heavenly appearances, must have forgot all worldly fear, and written at this early age solely after his own ideas. The manner in which he describes the dim superstitions of the false oracles is quite magical.

I mention these things here as illustrative of Milton's life. We must consider him now, when he had scarcely reached manhood, as already a perfect poet he had stamped his power; and

was entitled to take his own course accordingly in future life. Good words and pleasing thoughts may easily be worked into harmonious verse; but this is not poetry. I know nothing in which the genuine spell of poetry more breaks out than in the hymn I have here been praising. To show this, I must cite one more stanza :—

66

And sullen Moloch, fled,

Hath left in shadows dread
His burning idol all of blackest hue:

In vain with cymbals' ring

They call the grisly king

In dismal dance about the furnace blue :

The brutal gods of Nile as fast,

Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.

"These dreadful circumstances," says Warton, are here endued with life and action; they are put in motion before our eyes, and made subservient to a new purpose of the poet by the superinduction of a poetical fiction, to which they give occasion. Milton, like a true poet, in describing the Syrian superstitions, selects such as were most susceptible of poetical enlargement; and which, from the wildness of their ceremonies, were most interesting to the fancy."

There are magical words of the same character in almost every stanza. There is not a finer line in the whole range of descriptive poetry than this:

:

In dismal dance about the furnace blue.

Yet this ode Johnson passes over in silence. Milton was already in a state of mental fervour, in

VOL. I.

B