Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/202

182 Milton's earliest poetry. The sign-manual of his work are the "poetic diction" and the artistic evolution, and both are in evidence in the noble ode with which, in 1629, he enlarged the compass of English lyrical poetry. The hymn On the Morning of Christ's Nativity (which is indebted for suggestions to Tasso's Canzone Sopra la Cappella del Presepio), is the most finely evolved ode which English poetry had produced up to that date. It is not more poetic in feeling than the Epithalamium, but its thought-scheme is more complete, its crescendo and diminuendo elaborated with more conscious art. Beginning in a tone of hushed awe, the hymn rises steadily, one bell-like stanza pealing out above another, till the climax is reached in the angels' song, when it slowly subsides through the yet sonorous stanzas on the passing of the idols to the quiet close beloved of Milton. The two lyrical studies in "humours," composed at Horton, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, have the same skilful evolution, the same wholeness, and a maturer beauty of style. With Comus, composed at the same period, they are the most purely delightful of Milton's poems. Love of nature—none the less genuine because a student's love—reminiscences of Spenser and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Ariosto, pastoral and masque, Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy, mingle in these exquisite poems, written before classical pedantry had a little hardened his conception of style and form, and while he was still happy, unembittered by controversy, or by disappointment public and domestic.