Then thin digestive food he did provide, More to enable fleeting strength to stay, Balm of the warrior! herb Hypernicon ! To warriors, as in use, in form decreed, For, through the leaves, transparent wounds are shown, And rudely touched, the golden flower doth bleed. For sleep they juice of pale Nymphæa took, Which grows, to show that it for sleep is good, Near sleep's abode in the soft murmuring brook, This cools, the yellow flower restrains the blood. And now the weary world's great medicine, Sleep, This learned host dispensed to every guest, Which shuts those wounds where injured lovers weep, And flies oppressors to relieve the opprest. It loves the cottage and from court abstains, It stills the seaman though the storm be high, Frees the grieved captive in his closest chains, Stops Want's loud mouth, and blinds the treacherous spy. SONG. The lark now leaves his watery nest, And to implore your light, he sings; The merchant bows unto the seaman's star, Who look for day before his mistress wakes: ON THE CAPTIVITY OF THE COUNTESS OF ANGLESEY. O whither will you lead the fair And spicy daughter of the morn? Princes, though free, would fain have worn. What is her crime? what has she done? Or from his course mislead the sun, Or did her voice, divinely clear, Run, run! pursue this gothic rout, Sure all old lovers have the gout, The young are overwatched and sleep! JOHN MILTON. [JOHN MILTON (1608–1674) was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, 9 Dec. 1608. Educated at St. Paul's School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, he was destined by his family for the Church. From this, however, he was diverted, partly by his strong Puritan bias, partly by an ambition which possessed him from a very early period, to compose a great work which should bring honour to his country, and to the English language. Full of this lofty purpose, he retired to his father's country residence at Horton, in the county of Bucks. Here he gave himself up to study, and poetical meditation, in preparation for the work to which he had resolved to devote his life. He looked upon himself as a man dedicated to a high purpose, and framed his life accordingly. He thought that he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, . . . . not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy.' This residence at Horton constitutes Milton's first poetic period, 1632-1638. During these six years he wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, Arcades, Comus, and Lycidas. All these were thrown off by their author as occasional pieces, exercises for practice, preluding to the labour of his life, which he was all the while meditating. A journey to Italy, 1638-9, was undertaken as a portion of the poet's education which he was giving himself. He was recalled from his tour by the lowering aspect of public affairs at home. For the next twenty years his thoughts were diverted from poetry by the absorbing interest of the civil struggle. His time was occupied, partly by official duties as Latin secretary to the Council of the Commonwealth, partly by the voluntary share he took in the controversies of the time. The public cause to which he had devoted himself being lost, and the ruin of his party consummated in 1660, Milton reverted to his long-cherished poetical scheme. During the twenty years of political agitation this scheme had never been wholly banished from his thoughts. After much hesitation, 'long choosing and beginning late,' both subject and form had been decided The poem was to be an epic, and was to treat of the fall and recovery of man. He had begun to compose on this theme as early as 1658, and in 1665 Paradise Lost was completed. Owing to the Plague and the Fire, it on. was not published till August, 1667. It was originally in ten books, which were afterwards made into twelve, as the normal epical number, by subdividing books 7 and 10. The subject of the recovery of man had been dropped out of the plan at an early stage, and was afterwards made the subject of a second poem, Paradise Regained, on a hint given by Milton's young quaker friend, Ellwood. These years of disaster and distress, 1665-6, were specially prolific, if, as is probable, both Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were written during them. The two poems came out in r vol. in 1671, and closed Milton's second poetic period. He lived three years longer, during which he occupied himself with carrying through the press a new edition of his Poems (the 1st ed. was 1645) as well as several compilations, which furnished mental occupation without requiring inventive power. He died 8 Nov. 1674.] I. Our earliest specimen of Milton is a little poem which was first printed among the commendatory verses prefixed, according to a custom then prevailing, to the Shakspeare folio of 1632, where it is headed, An epitaph on the admirable dramatick poet, W. Shakspere. It was written in 1630, æt. 22. Though not Milton's earliest effort, it is the first piece of which it can be said that its merit does not lie chiefly in its promise. What he had written before this date, was, besides college exercises, an ode On the morning of Christ's nativity, Upon the circumcision, The Passion, On the death of a fair infant, &c. In all these early pieces is discernible in germ that mental quality which became in his mature production his poetic characteristic. This quality, which the poverty of our language tries to express by the words solemnity, gravity, majesty, nobility, loftiness, and which, name it as we may, we all feel in reading Paradise Lost, is already conspicuous in the sixteen lines of the epitaph on Shakspeare. This sublimity does not reside in the thesis which is logically enunciated, nor in the image presented. These are, as often in Milton, commonplace enough. The elevation is communicated to us not by the dogma or deliverance, but by sympathy. We catch the contagion of the poet's mental attitude. He makes us bow with him before the image of Shakspeare, though there is not a single discriminating epithet to point out in what the greatness which we are made to feel consists. An eighteenth century poet would have offered some clever analysis, or judicious criticism. 'Avant donc que d'écrire, apprenez à penser,' was the precept of that age for prose and poetry alike. To be sensible of the sudden decadence of poetry after 1660 we have only to compare, with this Miltonic tribute to Shakespeare, Dryden's lines on Milton himself prefixed to the first folio of 1688 : Three poets, in three distant ages born,' &c. In Milton's sixteen lines the lofty tone is so independent of the thought presented, that we overlook the inadequacy of the thought itself. Were we to suppress the feeling, and look only at the logical sentence, as Johnsonian criticism used to do, we should be obliged to say that the residuum is a frigid conceit in the style of Marini. We, the readers, are turned into marble monuments to the memory of Shakespeare—a farfetched fancy, which deadens, instead of excites, awe and admiration. 2. The dates of the two pieces headed L'Allegro and Il Penseroso can only be approximately given. They are with great probability assigned to the early years of Milton's residence at Horton, 1632 and following. The Italian titles show that they were written at a time when Milton had already begun to learn Italian, while the incorrect form 'penseroso' shows that he was only beginning. L'Allegro 'the cheerful man'; Il Penseroso is intended to mean 'the thoughtful man.' But from 'pensiero' the adjectival form is 'pensieroso.' There was an old form 'pensero,' but the Italian dictionaries do not acknowledge any adjective 'penseroso' as derived from it. Petrarch, with whom Milton must have been early acquainted, habitually uses 'pensoso,' but always with the connotation of 'sadness,' 'melancholy.' The two Odes, taken together, present contrasted views of the scholar's life. It is what the rhetoricians call an antiperistasis, or development of an idea by its opposite. Or we may rather regard them as alternating moods, buoyant spirits and solemn recollectedness succeeding and displacing each other, as in life. They are Milton's own moods, and might be employed as autobiography, depicting his studious days in those years when he was forming his mind and hiving wisdom. But they are ideally and not literally true, just as the landscape of the odes is ideally, but not literally, that of the neighbourhood of Horton. The joyous mood is the mood of daytime, beginning with the first flight of the lark before dawn, and closing with music inducing sleep. The thoughtful mood is that of the same scholar studying through the night, or meditating in his solitary moonlight walk. For the |