rather as a dramatic lyric than a drama;" and again of "Romeo and Juliet," that "it is in virtue of its exquisite lyrism that this masterpiece has bewitched the world;" and much of this element, as we have seen, is reflective.

Such an element in Shakespeare's verse starts some questions "ill to solve." What was the personal struggle of which he sings in the sonnets? What is the explanation of the emphasis he lays so often on the more serious side of human life? What was his real character as a man, and to what extent, if at all, is this revealed in his lyrics? Did Shakespeare "unlock his heart," as Wordsworth contends, or did he not, as Browning contends? Students of late are discussing with unusual interest the question of Shakespeare's possession or nonpossession of the melancholic temperament, of contemplativeness carried to the extreme of moroseness. Brandes, in his Critical Study gives large space to this open question. Suffice it to say that, despite all traces of misanthropy, Shakespeare exhibits in his character what has well been called a "manly seriousness," exhibited, in so far as his lyrics are concerned, in those sonnets and songs and idyllic passages of the plays, that interest us by their intrinsic poetic quality and impress us by their profound meditativeness.

It is gratifying to every English scholar thus to find the greatest of English poets in line with the pervading thoughtfulness of the best English lyrists from Spenser to Tennyson.

CHAPTER IV

The Lyrics of John Milton

S we take up the examination of Milton's

lyrical work, in any aspect of it, we recall the suggestive remark of Charles Lamb, "that a solemn cathedral service of song should be indulged in" as the most fitting preparation for such a study. Early in life, and throughout. he exhibited a characteristic sobriety of temperament, what Masson calls "a deep, habitual, and lovable seriousness." Thus he writes in "Paradise Regained" of the youthful Christ, and as if autobiographically:

When I was yet 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.

He acknowledges his "faculty to be but slight" in those frivolities that seemed to absorb so much of the time and energy of others. He could scarcely conceive how his fellow-students at Cambridge could so abuse their privileges. His first sonnet, written at his twenty-third year, is full of this sober reflection on life and its duty:

All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye.

Milton was constitutionally devout, his character

as a man and as an author being specifically Hebraic. It is thus in the light of what the great Puritan poet was and did that Wordsworth sings:

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour;
England hath need of thee....

We are selfish men;

O, raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

It is not strange, therefore, that when we come to the study of Milton's verse its meditative quality should be found to be conspicuous above all others. It is so in his prose and verse alike, in epic and drama and lyric, while it is in lyric verse, most of all, that it appears in its fullness and force, and controls all other features. The fact is that, with the exception of "L'Allegro" and a few of the shorter poems and sonnets, his entire lyrical product is of this reflective order, not a little of it passing over from the specifically secular into the domain of the sacred and spiritual.

Hence he opens his lyrical work, as, indeed, his poetic work, when fifteen years of age, with a paraphrase of two of the psalms of David, the second one of which has become an accepted selection in modern hymnology:

Let us, with a gladsome mind,

Praise the Lord, for he is kind.

Then follows what may be called the Christ Series of poems, or the Christus Trilogy, as we have such a trilogy from the old English Cyne