Still, as I did the leaves inspire,

With such a purple light they shone,
As if they had been made of fire,

And spreading so would flame anon.
All that was meant by air or sun,

To the young flower my breath has done.

If our loose breath so much can do,

What may the same in forms of love,
Of purest love and music too,

When Flavia it aspires to move?
When that which lifeless buds persuades
To wax more soft, her youth invades?

Song-Go, Lovely Rose.

Go, lovely rose !

Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her, that's young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That, hadst thou sprung

In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desired,

And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! that she

The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee,

How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

the father for conscience' sake tinctured the early feelings and sentiments of the son, who was a stern, unbending champion of religious freedom. The paternal example may also have had some effect on the poet's taste and accomplishments. The elder Milton was distinguished as a musical composer, and the son was well skilled in the same soothing and delightful art. The variety and harmony of his versification may, no doubt, be partly traced to the same source. Coleridge styles Milton a musical, not a picturesque poet. The saying, however, is more pointed than correct. In the most musical passages of Milton-as the lyrics in Comus-the pictures presented to the mind are as distinct and vivid as the paintings of Titian or Raphael. Milton was educated with great care. He had a private tutor, a Puritan divine, a Scotsman named Thomas Young, and when about the age of twelve he was sent to St Paul's School, London, whence he removed to Christ's College, Cambridge, being admitted a pensioner in February 1624-5. He was a severe student, of a nice and haughty temper, and jealous of constraint or control. He complained that the fields around Cambridge had no soft shades to attract the muse, as Robert Hall, a century and a half afterwards, attributed his first attack of insanity to the flatness of the scenery, and the want of woods in that part of England. Milton was designed for the church, but he preferred a 'blameless silence' to what he considered 'servitude and forswearing.' At this time, in his twenty-first year, he had written his grand Hymn on the Nativity, any one verse of which was sufficient to shew that a new and great light was about to rise on English poetry. In 1632, he retired from the university, having taken his degree of M.A. and went to the house of his father, who had relinquished business, and purchased a small property at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. Here he lived five years, studying classical literature, and here he wrote his Arcades, Comus, and Lycidas. The Arcades formed part of a mask, presented to the Countess-dowager of Derby, at Harefield, near Horton, by some noble persons of her family. Comus, also a mask, was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, then president of Wales. This drama was founded on an actual occurrence. The Earl of Bridgewater then resided at Ludlow Castle; his sons, Lord Brackley and Mr Egerton, and Lady Alice Egerton, his daughter, passing through Haywood Forest, in Herefordshire, on their way to Ludlow, were benighted, and the Above all the poets of this age, and, in the lady was for a short time lost. This accident whole range of English poetry, inferior only to being related to their father upon their arrival at Shakspeare, was JOHN MILTON, born in London, his castle, Milton, at the request of his friend, December 9, 1608. His grandfather has been Henry Lawes, the musician-who taught music traced to a certain Richard Milton of Stanton St in the family-wrote the mask. Lawes set it to John, near Shotover, in Oxfordshire, who was a music, and it was acted on Michaelmas night, zealous Catholic, and in the year 1601 was twice 1634, the two brothers, the young lady, and Lawes fined in the sum of £60, for absenting himself himself, bearing each a part in the representation. from the parish church, and refusing to conform Comus is better entitled to the appellation of a or submit. His son, John, the poet's father, moral mask than any by Jonson, Ford, or Massinnevertheless, embraced the Protestant faith, and ger. It is a pure dream of Elysium. The reader was disinherited by his bigoted parent. He established himself in London as a scrivener-scenes of fairy enchantment; but no grossis transported, as in Shakspeare's Tempest, to one who draws legal contracts, and places money ness mingles with the poet's creations, and his at interest. The firmness and the sufferings of muse is ever ready to moralise the song' with * See Life of Milton, by Professor David Masson-an able strains of solemn imagery and lofty sentiment. work, evincing great research, and containing original information. Comus was first published in 1637, not by its

Old Age and Death.

The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er ;
So calm are we when passions are no more :
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, too certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made :
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

JOHN MILTON.

The

probably hurried along by the stormy tide of events, till he could not well recede.

For ten years, Milton's eyesight had been failing, owing to the 'wearisome studies and midnight watchings' of his youth. The last remains of it were sacrificed in the composition of his Defensio Populi-he was willing and proud to make the sacrifice-and by the close of the year 1652, he was totally blind, ‘dark, dark, irrecoverably dark.' His wife died about the same time. In November 1656 he married Katherine Woodcock, daughter of a Captain Woodcock of Hackney; a child was born to them in October 1657, which died, and in February 1658 the mother also died. The poet consecrated to her memory one of his simple, but solemn and touching sonnets:

Sonnet on his Deceased Wife.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of childbed taint
Purification in the old law did save,

And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, goodness, sweetness, in her person shined
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

author, but by Henry Lawes, who, in a dedication to Lord Bridgewater, says: 'Although not openly acknowledged by the author, yet it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely, and so much desired, that the often copying of it hath tired my pen to give my several friends satisfaction.' Lycidas was also published the same year. This exquisite poem is a monody on a college companion of Milton's, Edward King, who perished by shipwreck on his passage from Chester to Ireland. Milton's descriptive poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, are generally referred to the same happy period of his life; but from the cast of the imagery, we suspect they were sketched at St Paul's School or at college, when he walked the 'studious cloisters pale, amidst 'storied windows' and 'pealing anthems.' In 1638, the poet left the paternal roof, and travelled for fifteen months in France and Italy, returning homewards by the 'Leman lake' to Geneva and Paris. His society was courted by the choicest Italian wits,' and he visited Galileo, then a prisoner of the Inquisition. The statuesque grace and beauty of some of Milton's poetical creations-the figures of Adam and Eve, the angel Raphael, and parts of Paradise Regained-were probably suggested by his study of the works of art in Florence and Rome. poet had been with difficulty restrained from testifying against popery within the verge of the Vatican; and on his return to his native country, he engaged in controversy against the prelates and the royalists, and vindicated, with characteristic ardour, the utmost freedom of thought and expression. His prose works are noticed The Restoration deprived Milton of his public in another part of this volume. In 1643, Milton employment, and exposed him to danger, but by went to the country, and married Mary, the the interest of Davenant and Marvell, as has daughter of Richard Powell, a high cavalier of been said, his name was included in the general Oxfordshire, to whom the poet was probably amnesty. The great poet was now at liberty to known, as Mr Powell had, many years before, pursue his private studies, and to realise the borrowed £500 from his father. He brought his devout aspirations of his youth for an immortality wife to London; but in the short period of a of literary fame. His spirit was unsubdued. month, the studious habits and philosophical Paradise Lost was begun about 1658, when the seclusion of the republican poet proved so dis- division of the secretaryship gave him greater tasteful to the cavalier's fair daughter, that she leisure; it was completed in 1665, as we learn left his house on a visit to her parents, and refused from Ellwood the Quaker, who visited Milton at to return. Milton resolved to repudiate her, and a cottage at Chalfont, in Bucks, to which the poet published some treatises on divorce, in which he had withdrawn from the plague, then raging in argues that the law of Moses, which allowed of the metropolis. He had then married a third divorcement for uncleanness, was not adultery time. In his helpless state, he stood in need of only, but uncleanness of the mind as well as the female assistance and society, and he requested body. This dangerous doctrine he maintained a medical friend, Dr Paget, to recommend him through life; but the year after her desertion- a wife. Paget recommended his own cousin, when the poet was practically enforcing his Elizabeth Minshull, daughter of a respectable opinions by soliciting the hand of another lady-yeoman residing at Wisaston, near Nantwich in his erring and repentant wife fell on her knees before him, 'submissive in distress,' and Milton, like his own Adam, was 'fondly overcome with female charm.' He also behaved with great generosity to her parents when the further progress of the Civil War involved them in ruin. In 1649, Milton was appointed foreign or Latin secretary to the council of state. His salary was about 300 per annum, which was afterwards reduced one half, when the duties were shared, first with Philip Meadowes, and afterwards with the excellent Andrew Marvell. He served Cromwell when Cromwell had thrown off the mask and assumed all but the name of king; and it is to be regretted that the poet did not, like his friend Bradshaw, disclaim this new and usurped tyranny, though dignified by a master-mind. He was

Cheshire. They were married, as recent inquiries have ascertained, in 1663, the lady being then little more than twenty-four years of age. She had no issue by Milton, whom she survived fifty-three years. Paradise Lost was published in 1667. The copyright was purchased by Samuel Simmons, a bookseller, on the following terms: an immediate payment of £5, and £5 more when 1300 copies should be sold; the like sum after the same number of the second edition-each edition to consist of 1500 copies and other £5 after the sale of the third. The third edition was not published till 1678, when the poet was no more, and his widow sold all her claims to Simmons for £8. It appears that, in the comparatively short period of two years, the poet became entitled to his second payment, so that 1300 copies of Paradise Lost

had been sold in the first two years of its publi-epithets, and images he freely borrowed, but they cation-a proof that the nation was not, as has were so combined and improved by his own been vulgarly supposed, insensible to the merits splendid and absorbing imagination, as not to of the divine poem then entering on its course detract from his originality. His imperial fancy, of immortality. In eleven years from the date as was said of Burke, laid all art and nature under of its publication, 3000 copies had been sold; and tribute, yet never lost its own original brightness.' a modern critic has expressed a doubt whether Milton's diction is peculiarly rich and pictorial in Paradise Lost, published eleven years since, would effect. In force and dignity, he towers over all have met with a greater demand! The fall of his contemporaries. He is of no class of poets; man was a theme suited to the serious part of the 'his soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.' The community in that age, independently of the style of Milton's verse was moulded on classic claims of a work of genius. The Puritans had models, chiefly the Greek tragedians; but his not yet wholly died out-their beatific visions were musical taste, his love of Italian literature, and not quenched by the gross sensualism of the times. the lofty and solemn cast of his own mind, gave Compared with Dryden's plays, how pure, how strength and harmony to the whole. His minor lofty and sanctified, must have appeared the epic poems alone would have rendered his name imstrains of Milton! The blank verse of Paradise mortal, but there still wanted his great epic to Lost was, however, a stumbling-block to the read- complete the measure of his fame and the glory of ing public. So long a poem in this measure had his country. not before been attempted, and ere the second Paradise Lost, or the fall of man, had long been edition was published, Samuel Simmons procured familiar to Milton as a subject for poetry. He at from Milton a short and spirited explanation of first intended it as a drama, and two draughts of his reasons for departing from the 'troublesome his scheme are preserved among his manuscripts bondage of rhyming.' In 1671 the poet published in Trinity College Library, Cambridge. His genius, his Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. however, was better adapted for an epic than a The severe simplicity and the restricted plan of dramatic poem. His Samson, though cast in a these poems have rendered them less popular dramatic form, has little of dramatic interest or than Comus or Paradise Lost; but they exhibit variety of character. His multifarious learning the intensity and force of Milton's genius: they and uniform dignity of manner would have been were 'the ebb of a mighty tide.' The survey of too weighty for dialogue; whereas in the epic Greece and Rome in Paradise Regained, and the form, his erudition was well employed in episode poet's description of the banquet in the grove, and illustration. He was perhaps too profuse of are as rich and exuberant as anything in Paradise learned illustration, yet there is something very Lost; while his brief sketch of the thunder-storm striking and imposing even in his long catalogues in the wilderness, in the same poem, is perhaps of names and cities. They are generally sonorous the most strikingly dramatic and effective passage and musical. 'The subject of Paradise Lost, of the kind in all his works. The active and says Campbell, 'was the origin of evil-an era studious life of the poet was now near a close. It in existence-an event more than all others dividis pleasing to reflect that Poverty, in her worst ing past from future time-an isthmus in the ocean shape, never entered his dwelling, irradiated by of eternity. The theme was in its nature connected visions of Paradise; and that, though long a with everything important in the circumstances of sufferer from hereditary disease, his mind was human history; and amidst these circumstances, calm and bright to the last. He died without Milton saw that the fables of paganism were too a struggle in his house in the Artillery Walk, important and poetical to be omitted. As a ChrisBunhill Fields—a small house rated at 'four tian, he was entitled wholly to neglect them; but hearths-on Sunday the 8th of November 1674. as a poet, he chose to treat them, not as dreams of By his first rash and ill-assorted marriage, Milton the human mind, but as the delusions of infernal left three daughters, whom, it is said, he taught existences. Thus anticipating a beautiful propriety to read and pronounce several languages, though for all classical allusions, thus connecting and rethey only understood their native tongue. He conciling the co-existence of fable and truth, and complained that the children were 'undutiful and thus identifying his fallen angels with the deities unkind' to him; and they were all living apart of "gay religions full of pomp and gold," he yoked from their illustrious parent for some years before the heathen mythology in triumph to his subject, his death. His widow inherited a fortune of about and clothed himself in the spoils of superstition.' £1000, of which she gave £100 to each of his The first two books of Paradise Lost are remarkdaughters.* able for their grandeur and sublimity. The delineation of Satan and the fallen angels 'hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,' and their assembled deliberations in the infernal council, are astonishing efforts of human genius-'their appearance dwarfs every other poetical conception.' At a time when the common superstition of the country presented the Spirit of Evil in the most low and debasing shapes, Milton invested him with colossal strength and majesty, with unconquerable pride and daring, with passion and remorse, sorrow and tears-'the archangel ruined, and the excess of glory obscured.' Pope has censured the dialogues in heaven as too metaphysical, and every reader feels that they are prolix, and, in some instances, unnecessary and unbecoming.

Milton's early poems have much of the manner of Spenser, 'particularly his Lycidas. In Comus there are various traces of Fletcher, Shakspeare, and other poets. Dryden, in his preface to the Fables, says: 'Milton has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original.' Browne, Fletcher, Burton, and Drummond also assisted: Milton, as has been happily remarked, was a great collector of sweets from these wild-flowers. Single words,

*Their acknowledgments of the sums received from the widow still exist, and fac-similes of them have been engraved. Anne, the eldest daughter, was unable to write, and makes her mark. The second, Mary, was barely able to trace the letters, in a very rude manner, and she misspells her name Millton. The third, Deborah, makes a tolerably distinct signature. Their education

must have been very defective.