which all the materials of poetry were spiritualised into a pure golden flame ascending in glory to the skies. Read also the two following lines, where the poet speaks of the flight of Osiris : In vain with timbrell'd anthems dark The sable-stoléd sorcerers bear his worshipp'd ark. We cannot reason upon the effect of such combinations of words, the charm is indefinable. Into what a temperament of aërial power must the author have been worked! Well might this sublime priest of the Muses then exclaim, Nec duri libet usque minas perferre magistri, No notice has been handed down how this extraordinary performance was received: it seems yet to have produced no fame to him. When he retired to his father's house at Horton next year, he retired as one who had yet done nothing. His Latin poems want the solemnity, the sublimity, the enthusiasm, the wildness, the imaginativeness, of these English, in which the spirit of Dante and Spenser already began to show itself, moulded up with a character of his own. But Ovid was a poet of a more whimsical and undignified kind, of whom it was strange that he should have been fond, but whom his Latin verses almost every where show to have been a great favourite with him. When we see to what holy subjects and holy imagery Milton's mind was already turned, there is reason for some surprise that he should still have had it in contemplation to produce an epic poem on the inferior and comparatively puerile theme of King Arthur, which no imaginative invention could have invested with the same dignity; when even chivalry had not yet arrived at its historic grandeur, and when every thing must have had a fabulousness which shocked probability. This is the more extraordinary, because Milton, though intimately conversant with the old romances, was still more familiar with the spirit, the language, the sublimity of the Sacred Story. It is clear that he was not frightened by the difficulty of duly treating this awful subject, from the manner in which he touched upon it in his majestic hymn, where he showed himself a master of all its mysterious tones. Had he at this time taken subjects from the Bible for a series of odes and hymns, he might even have excelled himself. He has been supposed not to have had a lyrical ear: nothing can be a greater mistake. The arrangement of his stanza, and the climax of his rhymes in this hymn, are perfect. To my perception there is no other lyrical stanza in our language so varied, so musical, and so grand. The Alexandrian close is like the swelling of the wind when the blast rises to its height. The poet perhaps already grasped at too immense a circuit of human learning: he might be at this early age darkening his mind with the factitious subtleties of politics and theology, which might overlay the sublime and inimitable fire of the Muse. It seems as if he pursued the most abstruse, dry, and puzzling tracks of study. It is indeed to be remarked, that in most of his poems there is an occasional over-fondness for allusion to these blind parts of learning. Life is not long enough for every thing; nor can the most ardent flame of the intellect entirely overcome an excessive superincumbence of dead matter. Though Milton's Latin poetry has been remarked not generally to partake of the character of his English, it has some exceptions. Warton observes of his poem 'In Quintum Novembris,'a college exercise, that "it contains a council, conspiracy, and expedition of Satan, which may be considered as an early and promising prolusion of the bard's genius to the Paradise Lost."" In this poem the cave of Phonos (Murther) and Prodotes (Treason), with its inhabitants, are finely imagined, and in the style of Spenser. "There is," says Warton, 66 great poetry and strength of imagination in supposing that Murther and Treason often fly as alarmed from the inmost recesses of their own horrid cavern, looking back, and thinking themselves pursued." In his seventeenth year Milton wrote a poem, ("In Obitum Præsulis Eliensis,') on Dr. Nicholas Felton, bishop of Ely, who died 5th October, 1626. In the midst of his lamentations he supposes himself carried to heaven. Cowper shall give the general reader a taste of it; for as Warton, candid in his very admiration, observes, "this sort of imagery, so much admired in Milton, appears to me to be much more practicable than many readers seem to suppose." I bad adieu to bolts and bars, And soar'd with angels to the stars, The sword that vast Orion draws, Or e'en the Scorpion's horrid claws, &c. &c. The same elegant and classical commentator remarks, that "the poet's natural disposition, so conspicuous in the Paradise Lost,' and even in his prose works, for describing divine objects, such as the bliss of the saints, the splendour of Heaven, and the music of the angels, is perpetually breaking forth in some of the earliest of his juvenile poems, and here more particularly in displaying the glories of Heaven, which he locally represents, and clothes with the brightest material decorations: his fancy, to say nothing of the Apocalypse, was aided and enriched with descriptions in romances." The next poem, Naturam non pati senium,' a college exercise, is also praised by Warton. He says that it is replete with fanciful and ingenious allusions. It has also a vigour of expression, a dignity of sentiment, and elevation of thought, rarely found in very young writers." The poem consists of sixty-nine lines. The whole is beautiful. In answer to those who assert the liability of nature to old age, the poet says, At Pater Omnipotens, fundatis fortius astris, Hence the prime mover wheels itself about Nor radiant less the burning casque of Mars. To gather home betimes the æthereal flock, And to discriminate the night and day.-CoWPER. Gray, a century afterwards, wrote tripos verses, |