INTRODUCTION.

[From MORLEY's A First Sketch of English Literature.]

"Milton was preparing to add to his course of education two years or more of travel in Italy and Greece. As a poet he did not count himself to have attained, but still pressed forward. In a letter to his friend, Charles Diodati, he had written, on the 23d of September: 'As to other points, what God may have determined for me, I know not; but this I know, that if he ever instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast of any man, he has instilled it into mine. Ceres, in the fable, pursued not her daughter with a greater keenness of inquiry than I, day and night, the idea of perfection. Hence, whenever I find a man despising the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring to aspire, in sentiment, language, and conduct, to what the highest wisdom through every age has taught us as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a kind of necessary attachment; and if I am so influenced by nature or destiny, that by no exertion or labors of my own I may exalt myself to this summit of worth and honor, yet no powers of heaven or earth will hinder me from looking with reverence and affection upon those who have thoroughly attained this glory, or appear engaged in the successful pursuit of it. You inquire with a kind of solicitude even into my thoughts. Hear, then, Diodati, — but let me whisper in your ear, that I may not blush at my reply, — I think (so help me Heaven!) of immortality. You inquire also what I am about? I nurse my wings, and meditate a flight; but my Pegasus rises as yet on very tender pinions. Let us be humbly

wise.'

"The opening lines of Milton's Lycidas repeat this modest estimate of his achievement. In Comus Milton had produced one of the masterpieces of our literature, but he felt only that the laurels he was born to gather were not yet ripe for his hand, and that when the death of Edward King called from him verse again, and love forced him to write, his hand could grasp but roughly at the bough not ready for his plucking.

[Here MORLEY quotes the first ten lines of LYCIDAS.]

"The pastoral name of Lycidas was chosen to signify purity of character. In Theocritus a goat was so called (Aevkitas) for its whiteness. Like

Spenser, Milton looked upon the pastoral form as the most fit for a muse in its training time. Under the veil of pastoral allegory, therefore, he told the tale of the shipwreck; but in two places his verse rose as into bold hills above the level of the plain, when thoughts of a higher strain were to be uttered. The first rise (lines 64 to 84) was to meet the doubt that would come when a young man with a pure soul and high aspiration labored with self-denial throughout youth and early manhood to prepare himself for a true life in the world, and then at the close of the long preparation died. If this the end, why should the youth aspire ?

'Were it not better done, as others use,

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?'

(As in Virgil, Ecl. VIII. 11. 77, 78; and Horace, Od. III. xiv. ll. 21-24.)

"But, Milton replied, our aspiration is not bounded by this life :

'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,

Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies;
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove:
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame, in heaven expect thy meed.'

"From that height of thought Milton skilfully descended again :—

'O fountain Arethuse, and thou honored flood,

Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds !

That strain I heard was of a higher mood;

But now my oat proceeds,' etc.

And we are again upon the flowery plain of the true pastoral, till, presently, there is another sudden rise of thought (ll. 108-131). The dead youth was destined for the Church, of which he would have been a pure, devoted servant. He is gone, and the voice of St. Peter, typical head of the Church, speaks sternly of the many who remain, false pastors who care only to shear their flocks, to scramble for church livings, and shove away those whom God has called to be his ministers. Ignorant of the duties of their sacred office, what care they? They have secured their incomes; and preach, when they please, their unsubstantial showy sermons, in which they are as shepherds piping not from sound reeds, but from little shrunken straws. The congregations, hungry for the word of God, look up to the pulpits of these men with blind mouths, and

are not fed. Swollen with windy doctrine, and the rank mist of words without instruction, they rot in their souls and spread contagion, besides what the Devil, great enemy of the Christian sheepfold, daily devours apace, and nothing said.' Against that wolf no use is made of the sacred Word that can subdue him,' of the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God' (Eph. vi. 17). 'But that two-handed engine,'—two-handed, because we lay hold of it by the Old Testament and the New, —

'But that two-handed engine at the door

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.'

Milton wrote 'engine' (contrivance of wisdom) and not 'weapon,' because 'the word of God, quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword' (Heb. iv. 12), when it has once smitten evil, smites no more, but heals and comforts.

"Here again, by a skilful transition, Milton descends to the level of his pastoral or Sicilian verse. The river of Arcady has shrunk within its banks at the dread voice of St. Peter, but now it flows again :

'Return, Alpheus: the dread voice is past

That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales,' etc.

"The first lines of Lycidas connected Milton's strain of love with his immediate past. Its last line glances on to his immediate future. Milton was preparing for his travel to Italy and Greece: To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

[From R. C. BROWNE's Introduction to the Clarendon Press Edition of MILTON'S English Poems.]

·

"Milton did not think to sing again for a while. On the conclusion of Comus he was prepared to rest, until his life's 'mellowing year' should bring to him the inward ripeness he had so long watched for. 'Long choosing and beginning late' his lofty theme, he was anxious not to forestall the ' season due' of his laurels by strains which to his purged ears would be harsh and crude,' though to others they might seem the resounding grace of Heaven's harmony. But though thus self-contained, he shrank from no obligation that human kindness and the custom of the time might lay upon him. His friend's memory claimed and received from his gentle muse the meed of a melodious tear. In Lycidas the event which gave occasion for the poem has the first place, and to it the various changes of theme are subordinate. As he recalls his life at Cambridge with his friend, and all the rich promise that Death had blighted,

the thought presses on him that even for one dearer to the muse than Edward King, for one whom universal nature might lament, the same dark fate may be at hand. And then of what avail in his strict meditation and constant straining after lofty ideals, that he may leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let it die '? For throughout his life Milton did not feel the exertion of his energies to be its own reward. He desired to know himself and to be known by the fruits of that exertion. 'His works,' as Hazlitt says, 'are a perpetual Hymn to Fame.' And here he meets and conquers that suggestion of the uselessness of high endeavor which has paralyzed so many strong arms and subtle brains. It is not we, after all, that are the arbiters of true Fame against the injustice of Time: the appeal lies to a higher than an earthly judge. As a later poet has sung, what is here left unfinished may be wrought out to perfection 'somewhere out of human view.' After the outburst on Fame, that strain is expressly said to be 'of a higher mood,' and the pastoral pipe proceeds. Then the stern denunciation of the pilot of the Galilean lake' scares away the lighter mythologic fancies, till they are wooed back by the melodious invocation to the Sicilian Muse, with its echoes of Perdita's catalogue of flowers. The hand that wrote Comus has not lost its cunning; but we do not find in Lycidas that unity of subject which charms us in the Ludlow Mask. The train of thought is divided, as the later title intimates, between the private grief and the prophecy of the woe coming upon England. The interval of three years had increased the confidence of the court and of the clergy. To silence every voice that their own lightest whisper might be heard, to keep in abeyance the settlement or to prohibit the discussion of questions felt to be vital by men more earnest and not less able than themselves, was the constantly sustained intention with which those in authority strained every existing statute, and were prepared to assume a power above the law.

"While the bishops in the court of High Commission were judging not merely the acts, but the supposed tendencies of others with unrelenting severity, their chief, Laud, ever the harshest and hardest, the effects of their own system, palpable to others, were to them invisible. The increasing number of proselytes to the old Church, his own inability to check the Romeward progress of his disciples, the Pope's offer of a red hat to himself, might surely have warned the archbishop that he was steering direct for Latium.' Men who saw these things, and therefore distrusted their spiritual pastors and masters, were not without excuse, even though some counter-bigotry was evinced in the stand made against the less important innovations.

"In Lycidas we hear the first note of the trumpet which was to be to the English throne and Church as were those blown before the walls of