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184 and with pure and high feeling in the heavenly vision of the close. Otherwise the sentiments which interest us are those which the poet utters regarding his own ambitions as a poet or the shortcomings of the Laudian clergy, in the passages where, breaking through the pastoral convention, he speaks in the trumpet-tones of the sonnets, and in the personal accents of a later lyric poetry. Apart from these passages, it is as a work of art that the poem commands admiration—by its marvellous evolution, the beauty of the ever-varying cadences (which were inaudible to Johnson), and the completeness with which the poet has assimilated and reproduced the artificial classical pastoral, as he was later to reproduce the artificial classical epic. There are none of Spenser's naïve, would-be realistic touches—his "cakes and cracknels," "curds and clowted cream"—and the poem gains thereby in harmony of impression.

Milton's visit to Italy, and the encouragement he received from Italian literati and from the aged patron of Tasso and Marino, encouraged him in the plan formed at Horton of writing some great poem that the world should not willingly let die. Italy was the home of the "Heroic Poem" in theory and achievement, and Milton's first dream was apparently to "out-go" Tasso and compose an heroic poem on the subject of King Arthur and his knights. He began, but found the task too difficult; and indeed it is difficult to conceive a satisfactory treatment even by