his studies, his amusements, his feelings, his ambitions; but these have more of amiable virtue in them than of imaginative richness. From one of these poems it comes out that he was rusticated from his college: the cause has been speculated upon with various comments and conclusions, according to the tempers and political and personal prejudices of the censors; but I have no doubt that Mr. Mitford's opinion is the correct one. Milton, with a haughty spirit, and a consciousness of his own great genius and learning, would not submit to academical discipline. The line Cæteraque ingenio non subeunda meo obviously means nothing but a repugnance to the observation of those petty formalities and rules which irritate and insult great minds: it is absurd to construe it to have been corporal punishment. He retired to his father's villa at Horton, near Colebrook, in Middlesex, glad to quit the dulness of the reedy Cam; and gave himself up entirely to the literature of his own taste in his exile-except during occasional visits to the capital to enjoy the theatres, and the conversation of his friends. His college was glad to have him back again, conscious of the honour he did them by his mighty gifts and acquirements of intellect. But at Horton he says of himself, Tempora nam licet hic placidis dare libera Musis, Et totum rapiunt me, mea vita, libri. Excipit hinc fessum sinuosi pompa theatri, Et vocat ad plausus garrula scena suos. Warton says, "Milton's Latin poems may be justly considered as legitimate classical compositions, and are never disgraced with such language and such imagery as Cowley's. Cowley's Latinity, dictated by an irregular and unrestrained imagination, presents a mode of diction, half Latin and half English. It is not so much that Cowley wanted a knowledge of the Latin style, but that he suffered that knowledge to be perverted and corrupted by false and extravagant thoughts. Milton was a more perfect scholar than Cowley, and his mind was more deeply tinctured with the excellences of ancient literature: he was a more just thinker, and therefore a more just writer: in a word, he had more taste, and more poetry, and consequently more propriety. If a fondness for the Italian writers has sometimes infected his English poetry with false ornaments, his Latin verses, both in diction and sentiment, are at least free from gross depravations. Some of Milton's Latin poems were written in his first year at Cambridge, when he was only seventeen: they must be allowed to be very correct and manly performances for a youth of that age; and, considered in that view, they discover an extraordinary copiousness and command of ancient fable and history. I cannot but add that Gray resembles Milton in many instances: among others, in their youth they were both strongly attached to the cultivation of Latin poetry." Such was Milton's boyhood and youth; so predominant was his genius from the first. It was at Horton that Milton seems to have meditated an Epic poem on King Arthur, or some other part of the old British story. See " 'Epitaphium Damonis" (Deodatus), and "Epistola ad Mansum." In his "Elegia in adventum Veris," written in his twentieth year, the poet tells us that his poetical powers revived with the spring. Milton's early love of the theatre has been already mentioned; Warton also observes this, and refers to "L'Allegro," v. 131: but in another place the critic remarks, that his warmest poetical predilections were at last totally obliterated by civil and religious enthusiasm. Milton's writings afford a striking example of the strength and weakness of the same mind. Seduced by the gentle eloquence of fanaticism, he listened no more to the "wild and native wood-notes of Fancy's child." In his "Iconoclastes" he censures King Charles for studying "one, whom we well know was the closet companion of his solitudes, William Shakspeare." Nothing could be farther than Milton was, in his own early poetry, from this sour puritanism. In his "Ode at a Solemn Musiek," he addresses "the harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse," to "wed their divine sounds:" And to our high-raised phantasy present With saintly shout and solemn jubilee; And the cherubick host, in thousand quires, Touch their immortal harps of golden wires, With those just spirits that wear victorious palms, Singing everlastingly, &c. Here is an anticipation of the "Paradise Lost." Again: in his "Address to his Native Language," at a vacation exercise in the college, anno ætatis 19, he says, But haste thee straight to do me once a pleasure, And from thy wardrobe bring thy choicest treasure; How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, To the touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings "Here," Warton again observes, "are strong indications of a young mind, anticipating the subject of the 'Paradise Lost,' if we substitute Christian for Pagan ideas. He was now deep in the Greek poets." The style, the picturesqueness of language, the character of the imagery, which Milton adopted from the first, was peculiar to himself. I do not say that many of the words, and even images, might not be found scattered in preceding poets, as Spenser, Shakspeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Joshua Sylvester's Du Bartas; but they could not be found combined into a uniform and unbroken texture, nor with the same uniformity of elevated and spiritual thought. In almost all precedent poets they are patches. That Milton was minutely familiar with the poems of all his celebrated predecessors is sufficiently evident: but so far as he used them, he only used them as ingredient particles. Spenser is rich and picturesque, but Milton has a character distinct from him. Milton's texture is more massy: the gold is weightier: he has a haughtier solemnity. CHAPTER II. CRITICAL ACCOUNT OF MILTON'S COLLEGE POETRY. THOUGH there were many things which had a tendency to make Milton in his boyhood and first youth discontented with the social institutions of his country, as they then displayed themselves in all their abuses; yet the relics of former greatness still remained in such preservation as to give full force to the imagination: the names, the feudal history, the trophies of former magnificence, were all fresh. Though King James was mean, pedantic, and corrupt, King Charles had a royal spirit, and a benevolent, accomplished mind: he loved literature and the arts, and had subtle, if not grand, abilities. At this time, therefore, Milton's love of monarchical and aristocratical splendour was contending with his puritanic education, and his personal hatred of arbitrary power: his rich imagination and his stern judgment were at variance: his early poems rarely, if ever, touch upon sectarianism: Spenser and Shakspeare, courts, castles, and theatres, did not agree with Calvinistic rigours and formalities. Milton's enthusiasm was, as Warton observes, the enthusiasm of the poet, not of the puritan. At this time he had more of description and less of abstract thought: that sublime elevation of axiomatic wisdom was not yet reached; but from his earliest years he appears to have been conversant and delighted with the tone and expressions of the Hebrew poetry: his grand and inimitable "Hymn on the Nativity" proves this. In that hymn is every poetical perfection, mingled with a sort of prophetic solemnity, which fills us with a religious awe: the nervous harmony and climax of the lines are also admirable. It was written in 1629, when he was in his twenty-first year, probably as a college exercise. Mark this stanza : No war, or battle's sound, Was heard the world around; The idle spear and shield were high uphung; The hooked chariot stood Unstain'd with human blood; The trumpet spake not to the armed throng; As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by. Or these two stanzas: The oracles are dumb; No voice, or hideous hum, Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving; Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving No nightly trance, or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; Edged with poplar pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent: With flower-inwoven tresses torn The nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. Dr. Joseph Warton observes here: "attention is irresistibly awakened and engaged by the air of solemnity and enthusiasm that reigns in this stanza and some that follow. Such is the power of true poetry, that one is almost inclined to believe the superstition real." I cannot doubt that this hymn was the congenial prelude of that holy and inspired imagination which produced the "Paradise Lost," nearly forty years afterwards. I am not aware that our young bard had any prototype in this sort of ode: the form, the matter, the imagery, the language, the rhythm, are all new. Milton seems himself in the state of wonder and awe of the shepherds, and of all those whom he describes as affected by this miracle. The trembling, the fervour, the blaze, is true inspiration. In this state, the poet, visited by heavenly appearances, must have forgot all worldly fear, and written at this early age solely after his own ideas. The manner in which he describes the dim superstitions of the false oracles is quite magical. I mention these things here as illustrative of Milton's life. We must consider him now, when he had scarcely reached manhood, as already a perfect poet: he had stamped his power; and was entitled to take his own course accordingly in future life. Good words and pleasing thoughts may easily be worked into harmonious verse; but this is not poetry. I know nothing in which the genuine spell of poetry more breaks out than in the hymn I have here been praising. To show this, I must cite one more stanza :And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of blackest hue: They call the grisly king In dismal dance about the furnace blue: The brutal gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste. "These dreadful circumstances," says Warton, "are here endued with life and action; they are put in motion before our eyes, and made subservient to a new purpose of the poet by the superinduction of a poetical fiction, to which they give occasion. Milton, like a true poet, in describing the Syrian superstitions, selects such as were most susceptible of poetical enlargement; and which, from the wildness of their ceremonies, were most interesting to the fancy." There are magical words of the same character in almost every stanza. There is not a finer line in the whole range of descriptive poetry than this: In dismal dance about the furnace blue. Yet this ode Johnson passes over in silence. Milton was already in a state of mental fervour, in which all the materials of poetry were spiritualized into a pure golden flame ascending in glory to the skies. Read also the two following lines, where the poet speaks of the flight of Osiris :In vain with timbrell'd anthems dark The sable-stolèd sorcerers bear his worshipp'd ark. We cannot reason upon the effect of such combinations of words,-the charm is indefinable. Into what a temperament of aërial power must the author have been worked! Well might this sublime priest of the muses then exclaim, Nec duri libet usque minas perferre magistri, Cæteraque ingenio non subeunda meo. No notice has been handed down how this extraordinary performance was received: it seems yet to have produced no fame to him. When he retired to his father's house at Horton next year, he retired as one who had yet done nothing. His Latin poems want the solemnity, the sublimity, the enthusiasm, the wildness, the imaginativeness, of these English, in which the spirit of Dante and Spenser already began to show itself, moulded up with a character of his own. But Ovid was a poet of a more whimsical and undignified kind, of whom it was strange that he should have been fond, but whom his Latin verses almost everywhere show to have been a great favourite with him. When we see to what holy subjects and what holy imagery Milton's mind was turned, there is reason for some surprise that he should still have had it in contemplation to produce an epic poem on the inferior and comparatively puerile theme of King Arthur, which no imaginative invention could have invested with the same dignity; when even chivalry had not yet arrived at its historic grandeur, and when everything must have had a fabulousness which shocked probability. This is the more extraordinary, because Milton, though intimately conversant with the old romances, was still more familiar with the spirit, the language, the sublimity of the Sacred Story. It is clear that he was not frightened by the difficulty of duly treating this awful subject, from the manner in which he touched upon it in his majestic hymn, where he showed himself a master of all its mysterious tones. Had he at this time taken subjects from the Bible for a series of odes and hymns, he might even have excelled himself. He has been supposed not to have had a lyrical ear: nothing can be a greater mistake. The arrangement of his stanza, and the climax of his rhymes in this hymn, are perfect. To my perception there is no other lyrical stanza in our language so varied, so musical, and so grand. The Alexandrian close is like the swelling of the wind when the blast rises to its height. The poet, perhaps, already grasped at too immense a circuit of human learning: he might be at this early age darkening his mind with the factitious subtleties of politics and theology, which might overlay the sublime and inimitable fire of the Muse. It seems as if he pursued the most abstruse, dry, and puzzling tracks of study. It is indeed to be remarked, that in most of his poems, there is an occasional over-fondness for allusion to these blind parts of learning. Life is not long enough for everything; nor can the most ardent flame of the intellect entirely overcome an excessive superincumbence of dead matter. Though Milton's Latin poetry has been remarked not generally to partake of the character of his English, it has some exceptions. Warton observes of his poem "In Quintum Novembris," -a college exercise, that "it contains a council, conspiracy, and expedition of Satan, which may be considered as an early and promising prolusion of the bard's genius to the 'Paradise Lost."" In this poem the cave of Phonos (Murther) and Prodotes (Treason) with its inhabitants, are finely imagined, and in the style of Spenser. "There is," says Warton, "great poetry and strength of imagination in supposing that Murther and Treason often fly as alarmed from the inmost recesses of their own horrid cavern, looking back, and thinking themselves pursued." In his seventeenth year Milton wrote a poem, ("In Obitum Præsulis Eliensis,") on Dr. Nicholas Felton, bishop of Ely, who died 5th October, 1626. In the midst of his lamentations he supposes himself carried to heaven. Cowper shall give the general reader a taste of it; for as Warton, candid in his very admiration, observes, this sort of imagery, so much admired in Milton, appears to me to be much more practicable than many readers seem to suppose." I bade adieu to bolts and bars, And soar'd with angels to the stars, The sword that vast Orion draws, Or e'en the Scorpion's horrid claws, &c. &c. The same elegant and classical commentator remarks, that "the poet's natural disposition, so conspicuous in the Paradise Lost,' and even in his prose works, for describing divine objects, such as the bliss of the saints, the splendour of heaven, and the music of the angels, is perpetually breaking forth in some of the earliest of his juvenile poems, and here more particularly in displaying the glories of heaven, which he locally represents, and clothes with the brightest material decorations: his fancy, to say nothing of the Apocalypse, was aided and enriched with descriptions in romances." The next poem, "Naturam non pati senium," a college exercise, is also praised by Warton. He says that it "is replete with fanciful and ingenious allusions. It has also a vigour of expression, a dignity of sentiment, and elevation of thought, rarely found in very young writers." The poem consists of sixty-nine lines. The whole is beautiful. In answer to those who assert the liability of nature to old age, the poet says, At Pater Omnipotens, fundatis fortius astris, No! the Almighty Father surer laid |