distr ae a rey oi Le Mi OEE ae vena ae alt 2 ied ay Shas Rr oes Ragen ast A une a oe Ta ene i eaten) fete Teun ae fis wih aay ti) eas eae Alaa tee Bed a ay an ots B oad fae Hs CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY WILLARD FISKE ENDOWMENT ee eee LY EG Pee e. iia STUDIES IN MILTON AND AN ESSAY ON POETRY \ hie i | ll i HHH 7 CTT mr HAN TT \ " MH TMT TTT WI UNAM © MILTON from the busi in Clay at Christs College, Cambridge ENGRAVED BY TIMOTHY COLE,N.A STUDIES IN MILTON AND AN ESSAY ON POETRY BY ALDEN SAMPSON, A. M. HAVERFORD COLLEGE AND HARVARD UNIVERSITY MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY NEW YORK MOFFAT, YARD & CO. 1913 me ii \ ow 3558S Si4 VANS A.2834 04 iF Copyright, 1913, by ALDEN SAMPSON IN REVERENCE AND AFFECTION Medtcated TO THE MEMORY OF PROFESSOR FRANCIS JAMES CHILD OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY TABLE OF CONTENTS FRONTISPIECE Engraved on wood by Timothy Cole, N. A., from the bust in clay, at the Master’s Lodge, Christ’s College, Cambridge, England. From Lycrpas to ParapisE Losr Mitton’s ConFEssion OF FAITH CrertTAIN ASPECTS OF THE PoETic GENIUS. Aprenpix: Tue Bust or Mitton % (em Gefevt BT + Bs 165 241 07 4 FUL ECR | FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST I HE years of Milton’s poetic career fall naturally into three groups: First the glorious decade of his youth, spent at Cambridge and Horton, dur- ing which were produced the poems that may be called those of promise, as full of delight as the promise of the morn, beginning with the Ode on the Morming of Christ’s Nativity, and ending with Lycidas. Following this came the twenty years of the middle period, from which sprang the impassioned cantos of his prose, a time of enormous importance to the poet as one of intellectual equipment and gestation, but which at the time was almost barren of poetic result in the form of verse. After this came another decade, or a little more, of mag- nificent achievement, the fruition of that aspiring pur- pose which is plainly seen throughout his whole career. During the twenty years of the middle period Milton wrote no verse except a little sheaf of sonnets in Eng- lish and Italian. These may well be separated and a part of them disregarded in a serious study of his poetry, 3 4 STUDIES IN MILTON since certain of their number are but the hasty record of transitory moods, so unpoetic sometimes as that of anger or resentment, and are hardly more to the student ‘than literary curiosities. Among the sonnets, however, are those which are of vital importance to any correct understanding of the poet’s nature, intimate confessions which spring from the very fountain sources of sin- cerity. If Wordsworth could say of the sonnet form: “With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,’—with equal fitness may it be affirmed of the Puritan poet. Through this medium more than once has he revealed vital traits of temperament, which we are fortunate indeed to dis- cern. In the sonnets is found the record of his affec- tions; if his loves were discreet, at least were they vital ‘to his happiness, the very nourishment of his soul. The sonnets register as well the pleasant relations which existed between him and the younger men who were always attracted to him, they record his appreciation of ; several of the leaders of the Parliamentary cause, and ‘they show his connection with public affairs of impor- tance both at home and abroad. In the verses To the Nightingale, usually called the First Sonnet, and composed in the same year as the lines On Shakespeare, when Milton was twenty-two years of -age, the poet followed the accepted models of the time, _and wrote in the vein of Spenser’s Amoretti, and of the - Italian sonnets, with which he was familiar: O Nightingale that on yon bloomy spray Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still, Thou with fresh hope the lover’s heart dost fill, While the jolly hours lead on propitious May. f he FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 5 Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day, First heard before the shallow cuckoo’s bill, Portend success in love. O, if Jove’s will Have linked that amorous power to thy soft lay, Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate Foretell my hopeless doom, in some grove nigh; As thou from year to year hast sung too late For my relief, yet hadst no reason why. Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate, Both them I serve, and of their train am I. The poet’s slighting reference to the “shallow cuckoo” is in striking contrast, and perfectly in dramatic keeping, |} with his enthusiastic and oft-repeated praise of the nightingale. The epithet “shallow” is used more than once by him to express contempt. Emerson has re- corded in his journal that his clever aunt, toward whom he was under such infinite obligation, once in a mood of expansiveness said to him, “I hate a fool’; and, as nearly as the mild and placid nature of Emerson was ca- pable of harbouring hatred at all, it was exactly this sort of person that most severely tried his patience. Mil- ton took no pains to conceal his contempt for the same individual; he could, and did, hate a fool with all his might. In Paradise Regained Christ speaks of one— “Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself.” (P. R, IV., 327.) To be shallow, with this man, was to be without the pale; here he could tolerate no compromise, it implied a lack of sincerity ; to be wanting in that was to be a candi- date for the nethermost pit, and the poet was never one wantonly to deprive the regions thereabout of any part or parcel of their Heaven-appointed host. 6 STUDIES IN MILTON Mark Pattison has commented upon Milton’s “bloomy spray,” reminding us that the flush of colour in the tender branches is apparent at the time when the nightingale first comes in April, before the bursting of the buds, when the circulation of the sap beneath brings a purple glow to the surface of the bark; and he aptly quotes from Arnold’s Thyrsis: Leafless, yet soft as spring, The tender purple spray on copse and briar. The exquisite bloom which this casts over the naked woods seen as a whole, and at a little distance, is as ador- able as the blushing of the morn; the time is the morn- ing of the year, a season ever dear to the awakened sensibilities of the poet. He is correct in placing the arrival of the nightingale and cuckoo before the leaves are out, but except for these slight touches of exact observation, the sonnet reveals little more of poetic sensibility or exercise of poetic art than a certain facility after Italian models. . In all that made appeal to the ear Milton had a sure j and unfailing instinct of appreciation and delight but in ‘his observation of the external universe he was in no \ sense a naturalist, as Gray, and Cowper, and Words- worth, and Tennyson perhaps, and Shakespeare, may be said to have been naturalists,—in their poems garnering with delight “the harvest of a quiet eye.” Milton loved scenery in its broad effects, and had all of the poet’s sen- sitiveness to the various moods of nature, and to the subtle variants of morning and of evening, and of night; one has but to recall the “opening eyelids of the morn” and a thousand similar expressions to be sure of that, FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 7 but he did not excel in the observation of nice details of natural objects. When he speaks of the nightingale it is the passion of thé musician and not in the most remote degree that of the ornithologist that is aroused. In con- trast with the shallow song of the cuckoo, his reverence for the deep, soul-satisfying quality of the nightingale’s song is most evident. His tributes to this bird are genu- ine and oft repeated, as where, in J] Penseroso, he bids Contemplation to summon Silence, her devoted and Heaven-appointed companion, — *Less Philomel will deign a song, In her sweetest, saddest plight, Smoothing the rugged brow of night; a charm lying in the very sadness of her melody to dispel care and bring a pensive smile of reverie and delight. The joys of Eden would lack one of their most entranc- ing accompaniments were the wakeful nightingale to withhold her song, — She all night long her amorous descant sung; Silence was pleased. (P. L., IV., 603-4.) That Silence here again should welcome a voice, how- ever sweet, required no slight degree of magnanimity upon her part, since it is evident that the advent of any sound, be it ever so agreeable, would not merely divide her reign, but quite despoil her of it altogether. Milton several times plays with the same theme. One recalls*the delightful passage where in Eden the gentle Raphael, the “heavenly guest,” has been describing the miracle of the creation, and the hymn of praise sung afterwards by the angelic host: 8 STUDIES IN MILTON The Angel ended, and in Adam’s ear So charming left his voice that he awhile Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear; Then as new-waked, thus gratefully replied. (P. L., VIIL., 1-4.) Adam’s love-song to his new-found bride borrows elo- quence from reference to the nightingale,—he seems almost to make that bird plead his own passion, and his appeal to his beloved is so contrived in subtlety that it suggests to our ears the actual song of the bird. The arrangement of flute-like vowels in this passage is one of the fine achievements of suggestive description, an imitation of that sound which is associated with the thing described. The verses are a sort of echo of the very notes to which they refer: “Why sleep’st thou, Eve? now is the pleasant time, The cool, the silent, save where silence yields To the night-warbling bird, that now awake Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song.” (P.L., V.,, 38-41.) To suggest the word “onomatopceia” in reference to these verses, would be almost as bad as incontinently to throw a stone at the bird whom they describe. Later, in giving an account to the Archangel Michael of these radiant hours of his new awakened life and love, he again pays tribute to the enthralling magic of this song: “To the nuptial bower I led her blushing like the Morn; all Heaven And happy constellations, on that hour Shed their selectest influence; the Earth Gave sign of gratulation, and each hill; FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 9 Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs Whispered it to the woods, and from their wings Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub, Disporting, till the amorous bird of night Sung spousal, and bid haste the evening-star On his hill-top to light the bridal lamp.” (P. L., VIII., 510-20.) In characteristic mood he delights in the note of sad- ness,—a sort of pensive gravity being that colour of his mind which shows all the more plainly when warmed by the emotions into a mood of delight: Sweet bird, that shunn’st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy ! Thee, chauntress, oft the woods among I woo, to hear thy even-song. (Il Pen., 61-64.) He might well have had in mind our own hermit- thrush, in its secret bower of aloofness, when he com- posed the following lines, so cool does the cadence of the song seem to penetrate the gloom, as if it came from the haunt of the bird, hidden in the remotest heart of some New England grove: The wakeful bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid Tunes his nocturnal note. (P. L., IIL, 38-40.) How caressingly the vowels fall upon the ear! The hermit-thrush of New England and the elusive genius of Hawthorne may not inappropriately be asso- ciated in recollection. The author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables has confided to us 10 STUDIES IN MILTON that his literary activities seemed to be aroused only in moods of happiness, and that then, by what might seem a strange contradiction of his nature, the creations of his genius in spite of all that he could do were to a greater or less degree tinged with sadness. Milton could have sympathized with this trait,—one perhaps inherent to the Puritan temperament that loved not the garish light; the summer sky was none the less pleas- ing that clouds hung about the mountain tops or veiled the brightness of the sun. Others may recall a some- what similar experience, the clairvoyance that comes in time of sorrow, as if then were opened the fountains of deepest recollection. The lady’s call for help in Comus has the same colour of sadness and delight: Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that liv’st unseen Within thy airy shell By slow Meander’s green, And in the violet-embroidered vale Where the love-lorn nightingale Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well. The verses are poured forth in “full-throated ease,” as if it were the song of the bird itself to which we were lis- tening. The poet never reveals a more convincing mood of sincerity than when he lauds the heavenly traits of “divinest melancholy”’: Pensive nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast and demure, * * * * Come, but keep thy wonted state, With even step, and musing gait, And looks commércing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes. (Il Pen., 31-8.) FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST It Elsewhere he makes Raphael refer to the “solemn night- ingale,’”’* and earlier in the same poem he speaks of — [The] silent night, With this her solemn bird. (P. L., IV., 648-9.) The word “solemn” has become so tainted to our ears by puritanical associations that it is bedeviled out of its original estate of serene dignity and charm; in Milton’s verse it had not yet acquired this quality of opprobrium. For instance, in Lycidas it seemed natural to the poet to group together, as part of the celestial host, both “solemn troops and sweet societies.” We have the poet’s assurance that his own “unpre- meditated verse,” when he was in the vein of composi- tion, came into his mind without effort on his part, in- stinctive and exuberant, like the flowing of clear waters in a spring, the sequel of thoughts that “voluntary move harmonious numbers.” Yet the way for this facility of utterance and spontaneous expression was carefully pre- pared beforehand by select reading and by meditation; so he created the mood which was to result in such abundant outpouring of the poetic spirit. The heavenly Muse came to him at night or in the delicious freshness of the early morn. His life is not spent in a blind man’s solitude, he assures us, while the voice divine visitst his slumbers, — Or when morn Purples the east. (P. L., VIL., 29-30.) Then all his powers were alert and vigourous. *P.L., VIL, 435. 12 STUDIES IN MILTON Aubrey informs us that in summer the poet rose at four o’clock, and began the day by having the Bible read to him in Hebrew; “then,” his biographer informs us, “he contemplated.” Having conversed with God, he took the time to commune with his own soul, and from this arose refreshed and with his powers concentrated and in the vein for poetic creation. The morning was spent in reading,—of course by means of the eyes of others,— and in dictation, some one always being at hand to take down that which fell from his lips. In the pathetic opening to the Third Book of Paradise Lost, where the poet makes reference to his own blindness, he tells us that in spite of his infirmity he wanders nightly in imagi- nation where the Muses haunt, and through the scenes made sacred by the footsteps of Christ,—by “Sion’s hill” and “Siloa’s brook,” — Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers. (P. L., IIL, 37-8.) What I would wish particularly to call attention to in this passage is the use of the word “voluntary,”—the confession on the poet’s part that he deliberately occu- pies his mind with thoughts which arouse his creative energies, just as the nightingale in order to rally his powers seems first to practise a few notes before burst- ing into song.* In Paradise Regained the poet’s meditations revert to the nightingale that sang in Plato’s Academe, a spot *I remember that an Oxford don once said to me that he was struck by this characteristic and that, moreover, what always impressed him par- ticularly in the song of the nightingale was its quality of distinction; “as if he had studied under the best masters.” FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 13 dear in associations, and one quick to arouse memories of delight, although his own footsteps had never literally followed those of his master, Plato.* He seems to have heard echoing in his mind the song of the bird itself when he composed the marvellous verse which so happily suggests the very notes that strike the ear as we listen to its rhapsody. It is to be observed that Milton in his re- treat at Horton was in the very centre of the nightingale country, the southeastern corner of Buckinghamshire. He has told us that his poetry sprang into his mind as he lay awake at night; then, he says, the verses came with- out effort, “with a certain impetus and cestro,” thanks to My celestial patroness, who deigns Her nightly visitations unimplored And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse. (P. L., TX., 21-4.) And he may well have been listening to the throbbing ecstasy of the nightingale when the verses formed them- selves in delightful harmony which refer to The olive-grove of Academe, Plato’s retirement, where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long. (P. R., IV., 244-6.) The thin and flute-like quality of the word “trills” con- trasts admirably with the gurgling and “jug-jug’’-like sound suggested in “thick-warbling.” + Moreover, * It had been Milton’s intention, when in Italy, to visit Greece, but he had felt constrained to cut short his foreign tour, to our deep and lasting deprivation. + Those who are familiar with the song will, I think, recall the quality of the notes to which reference is made. 14 STUDIES IN MILTON “notes” and “long” maintain the clear and sonorous quality of the verse. The literal and exacting naturalist would give to the male bird sole credit for the nightingale’s song, but evi- dently it seemed to the poet a trait of more complete seduction that this soul-satisfying torrent should pour from female throat; besides, in this he was but follow- ing conventional usage, both that of England and of Italy. Soon was his own ear rapturously to respond to the divine ravishment of Leonora’s voice in Rome. The poet’s invocation proved fruitless of any immedi- ate result, since he was destined still to remain unmar- ried for thirteen years, and it had been well then for his peace of mind had the liquid notes not reached his ear, which, First heard before the shallow cuckoo’s bill, Portend success in love. Seven years before, in Lycidas, this young scholar, steeped in classical usage, if somewhat inexperienced by actual contact, had invoked the pale ghost of Nexra with her touseled hair, but neither then nor now do we detect the note of passion. He ends properly enough, as a poet is bound to do: Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate, Both them I serve, and of their train am I. Blind, wifeless, and “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” he threw a thousand times the youthful fire into his praise of Eve when, half a lifetime later, in the youth of his old age, he came to sing her charms. We find what is lacking in this sonnet, somewhat of FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 15 the volume and surge of power which we have come to regard almost as synonymous with the name of Milton, in the ode On Christ’s Nativity, composed the year be- fore, while the poet was still a student at Cambridge. II THE second of Milton’s sonnets was written on the occasion of his twenty-third birthday, December 9, 1631, during the last year of his residence at Cambridge, and while he was a candidate for his master’s degree: How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year ! This “Petrarchian stanza,” as he describes it in a let- ter of very noble tone, was sent to a friend unknown to us, who had tried to persuade Milton to enter the church, and actually to set about doing something in earnest, instead of spending so much time in preparation for he knew not what. In this same letter the poet speaks of his life “as yet obscure and unserviceable to mankind,” and there is the implied promise that it shall not always so remain. Then, as ever, he was conscious of his power, only it would seem as if there must sometimes have come into his mind, as afterward into that of Keats, the pain- ful thought lest he should die before he had realized his| dream: Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high piléd books, in charact’ry, Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain. That reflection may well have given him pause, and warned. him against the awful risk of putting off until 16 STUDIES IN MILTON the morrow that which only with certainty, if with im- perfection, might be accomplished in the passing day. In this same letter to his friend, after referring to the allurements of renown and to the spur of fame, he goes on to say: “Yet that you may see that I am something suspicious of myself, and do take notice of a certain belatedness in me, I am the bolder to send you some of my nightward thoughts some little while ago, because they come in not altogether unfitly, made up in a Petrar- chian stanza which I told you of.” In this letter also occurs the significant phrase so characteristic of the rev- erence in which he held the poetic career ;—he refers to himself as “not taking enought of being late, so it give. advantage to be more fit.” Milton regarded the function of the poet as not so ' much that of the singer as of the inspired seer. Could Wordsworth’s differentiation have been present to his mind, he would doubtless have claimed that his own con- tribution to the happiness of mankind was to come rather from the “consecration” than from the “poet’s dream”; that might well serve to divert the scholarly leisure of his youth, but the appointed task of his manhood was to justify the ways of God to man. Deliberately and be- fore his twenty-third birthday he had formed the deter- mination to write a drama in the manner of the an- cients, or else a great epic poem, such as Homer, Dante, and Tasso before him had created, a purpose which he never relinquished ; and he had in mind so early as 1640 the general idea of Paradise Lost. In that year he re- corded the hope that “by labour and intense study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, I might leave something FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 17 so written to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die.” The poet’s original idea had been to compose his epic in the Latin tongue, a purpose which, fortunately for us, he afterwards saw fit to abandon. As we study this middle period of his career, with its manifold and very human interests and ties, we realize more clearly how he came to be in closer touch with mankind, and ceased to care for the approvance of scholars alone. It was not altogether from contempt for the ordinary sort of read- ers that he originally chose Latin as the medium of liter- ary expression, but because the Latin tongue was the universal language used by scholars the world over, and because he wished to reach these not merely in his own country but in Europe at large. Two years before, while in Naples, on the eve of his return to England, he had composed a Latin epistle in verse to the scholar, Manso, and in this had signified his intention of some day writ- ing a poem in the Latin tongue, perhaps on the Arthu- rian legend: “Perchance I shall call back into verse our native kings, and Arthur stirring wars even under the earth that hides him, or speak of the great-souled heroes, the Knights of the unconquered Table, bound in confed- erate brotherhood, and (O may the spirit be present to me!) break the Saxon phalanxes under the British Mars.” * The prayer of his youth was that of his more ad- vanced age: [Do thou], celestial Light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate: there plant eyes; all mist from thence * Masson’s translation. 18 STUDIES IN MILTON Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. (P. L., IIL, 51-5.) It seems an exaggeration of modesty to say, as he does in this sonnet on his twenty-third birthday, — My hasting days fly on in full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th. Already had he composed the lines On the Death of a Fair Infant, written at the age of seventeen, which a discriminating French critic* has pronounced a poem of such importance that it “foretells all the variety of his verse.” Besides the production of English poetry be- fore this time, he could show a considerable mass of verse in Latin, which he wrote with equal facility. The consensus of opinion among scholars seems to be that Milton’s Latin is very good indeed, but that Landor’s is better still. The latter poet, to all intents and purposes so far as Latin composition is concerned, was an ancient Roman who happened to be living in a later age, and one that spoke his native tongue with equal grace and flu- ency. Milton’s Latin poetry has the very unexpected quality of real emotion, strongly distinguishing it from almost all other modern verse in that language, and it has the rare distinction of ranking higher as poetry than as Latin, a sort of praise as unlooked for as would be that conferred upon a hairy mastodon for his glossy coat and agile ways, rather than for the majesty of his deportment and venerable antiquity. * De Montmorency. FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 19 There can be little question that the poet’s modesty was genuine and unfeigned when he continues: And inward ripeness doth much less appear, That some more timely-happy spirits endu’th. It would seem as if a youth need not repine who had, two years gone by, written the ode On Christ’s Nativity, wherein, if ever verse contained the echo of such, are heard celestial harmonies. On his ears fell the majesty and the sweetness of the mystic chants, whose ministra- tions before God’s throne never cease, the worship of his angels, — Sons of Light * * * = [whose] songs And choral symphonies, day without night, Circle his throne rejoicing. (P. L., V., 160-3.) Together in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice, hang Titian’s Visitation of St. Elizabeth, which he be- gan when he was fourteen years of age, and his Entomb- ment of Christ, upon which he was at work in his ninety-ninth year,— fitting monuments, marking the be- ginning and end of that long and crowded life, a life devoted to the service of Religion and of Art. In like manner, it was fitting that Milton’s first productién above the rank of college exercise, should be this Hymn on the Morning of the Nativity of Christ,— It was the winter wild, While the heaven-born Child, All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies,— the prelude of that career to be closed in solemn gran- deur by the Paradise Regained, wherein is portrayed the 20 STUDIES IN MILTON victory of Christ over Satan, and the declaring of his deity, the story of man proved God, and— Recovered Paradise to all mankind, By one man’s firm obedience fully tried Through all temptation. (P. R., L, 3-5.) As in properly attuned serenity of mind we read the ode On the Nativity we are permitted to share the trans- port of its creation, and to feel that the music which the young poet invokes in fervent devotion to greet his God, has touched his own sense; his Muse has been permitted to join her voice unto the Angel Choir: Ring out, ye crystal spheres! Once bless our human ears, If ye have power to touch our senses so; And let your silver chime Move in melodious time; And let the bass of heaven’s deep organ blow ; And with your ninefold harmony Make up full consort to the angelic symphony. Well may this song have been the very one sung by the angels of God before the manger where lay the new- born Son. In the sonnet which we are considering, modesty is shown again, here rather a characteristic of the nation than of the man, when he speaks of his approach to manhood on his twenty-third birthday: Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth That I to manhood am arrived so near. In this country perhaps we should regard with somewhat of suspicion the ingenuousness of a bachelor of arts on FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 21 his twenty-third birthday who should express any doubt whatever that he had arrived at man’s estate. The allu- sion to his personal appearance reminds one that Milton was distinguished for manly beauty all his life. A Latin epigram written in Naples when he was thirty years of age said of him: Mind, form, face, grace, and morals are perféct.* Aubrey says of him later in life: “He was a spare man.” “Of middle stature.” “His harmonicall and ingeniose soule did lodge in a beautifull and well-proportioned body. In toto nusquam corpore menda fuit.” “He had a delicate tunable voice, and had good skill. * * * He had an organ in his house, he played on that most. His exercise was chiefly walking.” “After dinner he used to walk 3 or 4 hours at a time, (he always had a garden where he lived), went to bed about nine.” Antony Wood has described his appearance at the age of twenty, while he was at Cambridge, when reading a scholastic exercise at Christ’s College, as “affable, erect and manly.” + At about this same time, by reason of the freshness of his complexion and it may be also from | the exuberance of “Hyacinthine locks Round from hie parted forelock * * * Clustering,” and from his gen-' erally youthful appearance, he was known as the “lady of Christ’s.” The gentle raillery in which this name was conferred was tempered with respect. Nothing bet- ter than chaff shows the drift of the wind, and Milton’s * Masson’s translation: + Garnett’s Milton, 26. 22 STUDIES IN MILTON college nickname points at characteristics which were a consistent part of his character. This same man whom Johnson accuses of having had the warmth of tempera- ment of an Eastern lord of the harem, at the start showed certain traits of fastidiousness, if they may be so desig- nated, which were at least sufficiently unusual to distin- guish him—so at all events as to attract comment— from the ingenuous youths who were his companions. In the Sixth Latin Elegy, written after five years’ residence at Cambridge, he has given us a glimpse of his quality in an epistle to his faithful Diodati, wherein he confides his conviction that they who would sing of demigods and heroes must content themselves with a beechen bowl, and with what he elsewhere after long lapse of time refers to as “the cool crystalline stream”’ : * Their youth should pass in innocence, * * * * * Pure as the priest, when robed in white he stands, The fresh lustration ready in his hands. (Cowper’s TRANSLATION, X., 148.) Masson says of the passage in which these lines occur, —and certainly if any man knew his Milton it was he,— “They deserve to be learnt by heart with reference to himself, or to be written under his portrait. They give a value to the whole Elegy.” + It may be urged that the words just quoted reveal the note of youth, but of a youth how noble! fit source from which to spring the joys of Eden, the sight of delicious Eve in innocence, and “recovered paradise to all mankind.” In a similar *S. A. 546. t Milton’s Poetical Works, ., 93. FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 23 way we have a revelation of his character in this face- tious sobriquet, conferred by his companions, of the “lady of Christ’s.” If a youth destined to accomplish great things is to cherish an ideal, and is to be thought fanatical by those around him in his devotion to it, the fact that the ardour of his early manhood was aroused in praise of chastity shows something in him not to be despised, something millions of miles beyond slothful ease and the primrose path. It need not cause us surprise that the master poet of the Puritans cherished such an ideal. The critic while passing this phase of his career in review, may at least condone the poet’s enthusiasm if he cannot quite bring himself to share it, accrediting it to the purity of his upbringing and to the exaltation of an all-too-rare poetic sensibility. This was no ordinary youth with whom we are dealing; this man was also a spirit, one “finely moved but to fine issues”; why should we not expect something unusual and sublimated in his case? Certainly his preparation had been as little ordi- nary as one could conceive. We have his own statement, confirmed by the testimony of others, that from the twelfth year of his age he rarely went to bed until mid- night, such was his eagerness to prosecute his studies. This life may well have put the seal of scholarship and of a certain sedate gravity on his countenance, through which shone “the tranquil lustre of a lofty mind.” This phase of Milton’s character in his youth may not be slurred over; it is a vital and inherent trait of his real temperament and disposition. If one would penetrate to the very secret of the Chris- tian spirit he could not do better than to take to heart 24 STUDIES IN MILTON the admonition of St. Paul: “Approving ourselves * * * by pureness, by kindness, by love unfeigned.” Not in all of these, by any means, was Milton equally preémi- nent; others, it may well be, have been more generously endowed with the supreme virtue of “loving-kindness” toward all men, but to no one was it given to respond more vigorously to one of this trinity of perfections than to him from whose soul the motive of Comus sprang as an instinctive correlate of beauty. “Chastity is the flowering of man,” Thoreau main- tained; and this was exactly the attitude of Milton dur- ing the formative period of his poetic life and of his character. He was so constituted that herein there was a “marriage of true minds”; his character and his ge- nius are so inextricably involved that in everything that springs from the fountain of his creative energy both are perfectly apparent. His was not the sort of intelli- gence that could evolve anything that would not meet with the complete sanction of his reason and of his con- science ;— which is only equivalent to saying that he did not primarily possess the dramatic temperament: at all events, it certainly did not possess him. In 1642, some time before he wrote the sonnet “When the Assault was intended to the City,” he felt called upon in a pamphlet * to discuss his own career while at the University. Here we get a glimpse of his real quality in a wonderful and well-known passage: “And long it was not after when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, that is a composition and pattern of * An Apology against a Pamphlet called “A Modest Confutation,” etc. FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 25 the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy. “These reasonings together with a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness and self-esteem, either of what I was or what I might be, which let envy call pride, and lastly that modesty, whereof, though not in the title- page, yet here, I may be excused to make some beseem- ing profession, all these uniting the supply of their natu- ral aid together, kept me still above those low descents of mind, beneath which he must deject and plunge him- self, that can agree to saleable and unlawful prostitu- tions. “Next, for hear me out now, readers, that I tell ye whither my younger feet wandered, I betook me among those lofty fables and romances which recount in sol- emn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown in all Christendom. There I read it in the oath of every knight, that he should defend to the expense of his best blood, or of his life if it so befell him, the honour and chastity of virgin or matron. From whence even then I learnt what a noble virtue chastity ever must be, to the defence of which so many worthies by such dear adventure of themselves had sworn. And if I found in the story afterwards any of them by word or deed breaking that oath, I judged the same fault of the poet as that:which is attributed to Homer to have written undecent things of the gods. Only this my mind gave me, that every free and gentle spirit without that oath ought to be born a knight, nor needed to expect the gilt 26 STUDIES IN MILTON spur, or the laying of a sword upon his shoulder, to stir him up both by his counsel and his arm to serve and pro- tect the weakness of any attempted chastity. So that even those books which to many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose living, I cannot think how unless by divine indulgence, proved to me so many in- citements to the love and steadfast observation of virtue.” When this came from Milton’s pen he was still a comparatively young man; it is the aspiration of his ‘youth that he has revealed, and from this fountain un- defiled sprang the distinction and sustained grandeur of thought and style which are the unfailing and pre- eminent traits of Paradise Lost.* Landor most happily applies to Milton the words of Eve: “From thee How shall I part, and whither wander down Into a lower world?” (P. L., XI, 281-2.) In the grand manner, in sublimity of style, none has excelled Milton. To detect the distinction of that verse is the commanding reward of cultivation in letters, to appreciate that and to respond to its appeal. It is offered to our age, almost disregarded, but, like the crystal in the rock, a thousand years impair not the perfection of its purity. Though in maturity he very clearly distinguished be- tween temperate enjoyment and asceticism,— having lit- * "Tt is the aspiration after the pure and noble life, the aspiration which stamps every line he wrote, verse or prose, with a dignity as of an heroic age.” Pattison. FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 27 tle patience with the latter,—yet during all his life he believed that man’s body and spirit were interfused and commingled, and that legitimate delights of the body were the nourishment of the spirit, and by a natural corollary that whatever degraded the body at the same time defiled the spirit. Later in life, when he came to write the Christian Doctrine, he carried the idea of the inextricable partnership of mind and matter to its logi- cal conclusion, accepting literally the resurrection of the body, and declaring his belief in the suspended animation after death of body and soul alike until the trump of the Last Judgment shall have aroused them. The spirit was the vital and illuminating principle of the body, as was the light of the sun.* Well may such a youth, without any mental reservation whatever, have acted upon the belief that his body was the temple of God. We shall see that his more mature judgment and evolution of belief demanded equal rev- erence for both; neither could be treated with con- tumely; both were created by God; and since each of them shared in the well-being and in the suffering of the other, they were mutually joined for better or for worse, and were to be separated not even by death. It was a marriage making them one flesh, one spirit. If then in his present mood he believed that the spirit of God dwelt within him, he may well have regarded any physical degradation, or what might be so conceived by him, as a dimming of the light which is its essence. To * Compare this passage in Satan’s apostrophe to the orb of day: “Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul.” ’ (P. L,, V., 171.) 28 STUDIES IN MILTON Milton in his youth the words of Raphael might as fit- tingly have been addressed as to the new-created Adam: “God on thee Abundantly his gifts hath also poured, Inward and outward both, his image fair: Speaking or mute, all comeliness and grace Attends thee, and each word, each motion, forms.” (P. L., VIIL., 219-23.) To no man of our race could this great Angel more fit- tingly have said: “Nor less think we in Heaven of thee on Earth Than of our fellow-servant. e * For God, we see, hath honoured thee.” (P. L., VIII, 224-28.) And no slight part of Milton’s strength lay in this very fact that he too believed that God had honoured him; and in the conviction of that belief he regulated his life. The passage quoted from the Sixth Elegy expressed not merely a mood of adolescence, later to evaporate and disappear. When he was about to begin the compo- sition of Paradise Lost he invoked Urania in similar vein: And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples the upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know’st; * = * * what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support.* (P. L., L., 17-23.) Can there be question that the aspiration of the last six lines of the sonnet was in serious earnest? The * “That the Spirit enlightens the mind within, in this belief the Puritan saint, the poet, and the prophet, who all met in Milton, were at one.” Pattison, Milton, 188. FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 29 verses have the solemnity of a prayer, and express the feeling which guided his whole life: Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me and the will of Heaven; All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task Master’s eye. Long afterwards, blind, defeated, and in distress, he could write in the same serenity of mind: Live well; how long or short permit to Heaven.” “Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv’st | (P. L., XI, 553-4.) III THE ode On the Nativity of Christ, the verses On Shakespeare, the First and Second Sonnets, were written while Milton was still a student at Cambridge. Fortu- nately his father’s means, whose profession as a scriv- ener, combining the functions of lawyer and legal sta- tioner, was a moderately lucrative one, opening the way for wise investment, made a fellowship unnecessary for ~ him; and after leaving the University he spent six years at Horton in study and writing.* These have been called *“TIn this delicious retirement of Horton, in alternate communion with nature and with books, for five years of persevering study he laid in a stock, not of learning, but of what is far above learning, of wide and accu- rate knowledge. Of the man whose profession is learning, it is character- istic that knowledge is its own end, and research its own reward. To Mil- ton all knowledge, all life, virtue itself, was already only a means to a further end. He will know only that which is of use to know, and by useful, he meant that which conduced to form him for his vocation of poet.” “AIl he reads, sees, hears, is to him but nutriment for the soul.” Mark Pattison, Milton, 15, 27. 30 STUDIES IN MILTON the years of preparation, but they were, as well, years of generous production, during which were composed Comus, L’ Allegro, Il Penseroso and Lycidas. Milton has borne testimony to his father’s aid and generosity more than once; for instance in the Latin poem ad- dressed to him, written soon after leaving Cambridge, at a time when, it may be somewhat to his father’s grief, he had formed the determination not to enter the church, but to devote his life to poesy: Thou hatest not the gentle Muse, My Father! for thou never bad’st me tread The beaten path, and broad, that leads right on To opulence, nor didst condemn thy son To the insipid clamours of the bar, To laws voluminous, and ill observed ; But, wishing to enrich me more, to fill My mind with treasure, led’st me far away From city din to deep retreats, to banks And streams Aonian, and, with free consent, Didst place me happy at Apollo’s side. (Ad Patrem, Cowrer’s TRANSLATION.) The poet goes on to say that after he had mastered Latin and Greek, it was by his father’s encouragement that he had learned French, Italian and Hebrew; the lat- ter wished him also to be conversant with Natural Science, and, in short, would have had him, like Bacon, accept all learning as his province. His bringing up was that of one consecrated to a high calling, to an appointed task. The poet himself never doubted this. In a lesser man such a belief would simply have amounted to ridicu- lous presumption; only as it became justified by the event,—or, rather, as the event showed its foundation FROM LYCIDAS TO PARADISE LOST 3I to be laid in modesty rather than in overweening con- ceit,—did it assume a character of simple dignity. Un- der a thin disguise in Paradise Regained, the poet, then nearing the end of his career. confesses, in the words of Christ. his own early attitude of mind: “When I was vet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing; all my mind was set Serious to learn and know, and thence to do, What might be public good: myself I thought Born to that end, born to promote all truth, All righteous things.” (P. R.. I.. 200-6.) Tae voice is Tacob’s voice!” The poet had received careful instruction in music from his father Ton Milton, whe was a devotee to the art, and w2s himseli a composer whose work was known and appreciated in his day. Various madrigals which he had set to music were published in the Triumphs of Oriana. contributed by several poers and musicians in honour of Queen Elizabeth: and we have the statement ot the peet’s nephew that when the Palatine of Sircdia.a Polish prince, visited Oxford in 1583. the elder Afiton had composed a musical celebration in ferry parts in honour of the cuest. Philips records that this Polish nobleman had the grace to present to him a gold cham in recognition of his s