LOVERS MEETING O MISTRESS mine, where are you roaming? Every wise man's son doth know. What is love? 't is not hereafter; In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty, Twelfth Night. FIDELE FEAR no more the heat o' the sun Home art gone and ta'en thy wages: Golden lads and girls all must, Fear no more the frown o' the great, To thee the reed is as the oak: Fear no more the lightning-flash Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finish'd joy and moan: All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust. Cymbeline. Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee; Sing willow, willow, willow; The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur'd her m Her salt tears fell from her, and soften'd the stones; my garland. Othe CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH CRABBED Age and Youth Cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasance, Age is full of care; Youth like summer morn, Age's breath is short, Youth is nimble, Age is lame: Age is weak and cold, Youth is wild, and Age is tame: Age, I do abhor thee, Youth, I do adore thee; O, my Love, my Love is young! O sweet shepherd, hie thee, For methinks thou stay'st too long. The Passionate Pilgrim (1608-1674) race are thousands of readers," says Matthew d, "presently there will be millions, who not a word of Greek or Latin, and will never languages. If this host of readers are ever sense of the power and charm of the great tiquity, the way to gain it is not through of the ancients but through the original Milton, who has the like power and charm has the like grand style." atthew Arnold elsewhere says: are a few characters which have stood the utiny and the severest tests, which have been he furnace and have proved true. Of these 1. Certain high moral dispositions Milton had e; he sedulously trained and developed them became habits of great power. n's power of style has for its great character which clearly comes in the main from a moral him his pureness. How high, clear, and is his pureness; and how intimately does its ter into the voice of his poetry! What gives professions such a stamp of their own is their f absolute sincerity. In this elevated strain of reness his life was really pitched; its strong beauty passed into the diction and rhythm of The ordinary man finds it practically impossible to read more than a page or two of "Paradise Lost" at a time. It is too terribly majestic, too exhausting in its mighty flight through time and space. In some of Milton's sonnets, however, we find the same loftiness, the same sublime purity, but within our reach; and in such light lyrics as "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso we may at our ease enjoy the sweet music of the cathedral organ without the pomp and ceremony of the celebration of holy mass. And these will prepare us to read with enjoyment the majestic Hymn on the Nativity" which we read more for its solemn and rolling beauty, its majestic sound, than for any sustaining thought which we shall find in it. 66 Milton was steeped in the ancient classics. Many of his prose works he wrote in Latin. He was moreover a churchman, an ecclesiastic; but so possessed by the overmastering power of natural beauty that he transcends the hard conventionality of creed, and gives us the sublimity of religion, of time-established traditions and beliefs, in forms of perfect poetic beauty. Great Christian as he is, he seems half pagan. Or, rather, he makes Christianity a universal religion, singing hymns in which all the world can join. We may contrast Milton with Wordsworth, -the poet of purely natural religion, the religion of material nature. Milton is the poet of nature in man, of man as one of Nature's products, of human tradition and form and convention, as things that have grown in just the same way that an oak has grown in the forest, or the geological formations of earth have come about with ages. Too often we forget that we, too, are Nature's children; and when the narrowness of creed and nationality and prejudice deform our conceptions, it is right that we should deliberately set God's work over against man's work. But in Milton the sublime beauty of divinity raises us out of our world of narrowness and littleness, and shows us the growth of tradition as part of God's work, and to us by far the most majestic part. L'ALLEGRO HENCE, loathed Melancholy Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born 'Mongst horrid shapes and shrieks, and sights Find out some uncouth cell, Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous And the night-raven sings, There, under ebon shades and low-brow'd rocks, In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. But come, thou Goddess, fair and free, The frolic wind that breathes the spring, Zephyr, with Aurora playing, As he met her once a-Maying, |