Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/218

198 the meaning of the great tragedy, and which lesser men than Milton—Giles Fletcher, Crashaw, Vaughan, Vondel—descried at moments. To that vision there is no access "nisi per charitatem," and some want of love was Milton's misfortune. Vondel is a less sublime poet, a far less wonderful artist, than Milton, but there is more of Christian feeling in his description of the cloud of sorrow which veiled the throne of the Godhead when Lucifer rebels than in the fierce derision with which Satan's first movements are noted in Milton's heaven.

But when Milton's limitations have been most fully enumerated. Paradise Lost remains one of the world's greatest poems, in invention, imagination, construction, language, and harmony. The sublimity and beauty of the style—a style as individual, as bold in its rejection of precedent, even of English idiom, as in a different way was Carlyle's later prose,—the sustained and majestic rhythm of the verse, never flag from the opening invocation to the quiet and solemn close. If a poet is to be judged, not alone by individual beauties, but by the greatness and completeness of his achievement, Milton's place as the second of English poets is unassailable.

Milton's last works showed no failure of the originality, the power of creating and perfecting new forms, which had signalised his work from the outset. Paradise Regained (1671) is not the only short epic on a New Testament subject which the seventeenth century produced, but it is by far the finest. It is not likely that Milton knew