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against the Presbyterians, and domestic liberty against the tyranny of canon law." The poet becomes philosopher and statesman; and the glory of English lit-,, mac. erature, the champion and martyr of English liberty. As recreation from the severe strain of composing the prose controversial pamphlet, Milton threw off those sonnets so charged with the personal note that they bring us into the passion and the pathos that constituted his deepest life during these memorable years.

The splendid prophecy of the future of English literature which the Milton of these two periods presents, is that of intellectual and moral earnestness

revealed in the highest type of beauty the union of Arnold sweetness and light.

We are wont to give a too great proportion of attention to the Milton of Paradise Lost, and the result is a belief that Milton lacked the finer and sweeter qualities with which we associate Spenser and Shakespeare. The historian has emphasized certain types of the Puritan revealed in the political and religious activity of the time, and has given us for the most part the formal, rather than the real, Puritan. Hence he has become a symbol of an austere, harsh and canting reformer, who finds little in the nature of existing politics and religion which is to his mind. And although between Clarendon and Macaulay we have a great variety of types, they severally need supplementing by a careful study of that furnished by the Milton of the Shorter Poems. Here will be found nothing of religious cant, no hatred of art and beauty even when they are misused, no frowning upon wholesome gaiety, but a generous recognition of all those elements that tend to make life

stronger in hope, more perfect in temper, and finer in spirit.

The love of nature and man, and the pleasures afforded by a life of ease and social converse revealed in L'Allegro; the love of art and philosophy, and the delights of solitude in Il Penseroso; the tribute paid to noble men and gentle women in song, action, and all the magnificent appointments of the Masque, with its splendid condemnation of the fanaticism of Prynne; the tender and delicate passion in the poems on Diodati; and the passion for liberty, the prayers for toleration, and the religious rapture set in the strong framework of the political sonnets, present us a truer type in heart and intellect of that real Puritanism which lay beneath the less attractive manifestations. Here is the type of all that was deepest and most permanent in English life between the luxuriousness of the Elizabethan and the licentiousness of the Restoration.

The highest note of the prose of these periods confirms the revelation of the verse. "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose," says he in the Areopagitica, "to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? . . . How many other things might be tolerated in peace, and left to conscience, had we but charity, and were it not the chief stronghold of our hypocrisy to be ever judging one another?"

APPRECIATIONS

"NOR Second He, that rode sublime Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, The secrets of th' Abyss to spy.

He pass'd the flaming bounds of Place and Time: The living Throne, the sapphire-blaze,

Where Angels tremble while they gaze,

He saw; but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night."

GRAY.

"MILTON! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart :
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay."

WORDSWORTH.

"O MIGHTY-MOUTH'D inventor of harmonies,
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages;

Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean

Rings to the roar of an angel onset
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
And crimson-hued the stately palm woods
Whisper in odorous heights of even."

TENNYSON.

"HE left the upland lawns and serene air
Wherefrom his soul her noble nurture drew,
And reared his helm among the unquiet crew
Battling beneath; the morning radiance rare
Of his young brow amid the tumult there

Grew grim with sulphurous dust and sanguine dew;
Yet through all soilure they who marked him knew
The signs of his life's dayspring, calm and fair.
But when peace came, peace fouler far than war,
And mirth more dissonant than battle's tone,
He, with a scornful sigh of his clear soul,
Back to his mountain clomb, now bleak and frore,
And with the awful night he dwelt alone,
In darkness, listening to the thunder's roll."

ERNEST MYERS.

"THE egoism with which all Milton's poetry is impregnated is the egoism of a glorious nature. If we were asked who in the eighteen Christian centuries stands before us as the highest approximation to what we conceive as Christian manhood, in which are rarely blended purity and passion, gracefulness and strength, sanctity and manifold fitness for all the worldly duties

of the man and the citizen, we should scarcely hesitate to answer - John Milton."

REV. F. W. ROBERTSON.

"THE genius and office of Milton were to ascend by the aids of his learning and his religion - by an equal perception, that is, of the past and the future to a higher insight and more lively delineation of the heroic life of man. This was his poem; whereof all his indignant pamphlets and all his soaring verses are only single cantos or detached stanzas. It was plainly needful that his poetry should be a version of his own life, in order to give weight and solemnity to his thoughts, by which they might penetrate and possess the imagination and the will of mankind. . . His own conviction it is which gives such authority to his strain. Its reality is its force. If out of the heart it came, to the heart it must go."

EMERSON.

"MILTON'S Sublimity is in every man's mouth. Is it felt that his poetry breathes a sensibility and tenderness hardly surpassed by its sublimity? We apprehend that the grandeur of Milton's mind has thrown some shade over his milder beauties; and this it has done, not only by being more striking and imposing, but by the tendency of vast mental energy to give a certain calmness to the expression of tenderness and deep feeling. A great mind is the master of its own enthusiasm, and does not often break out into those tumults which pass with many for the signs of profound emotion. Its sensibility, though more intense and enduring, is more self-possessed and less per