Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/221

Rh from the religious bodies around him, while the rigour with which he still clung to the Bible kept him out of touch with the larger rationalism of the age. There was no room in Milton's later poems for the Platonism of Spenser which lingers in Comus. Hellenic thought and Hebraic revelation come into harsh conflict in Paradise Regained, when Christ arraigns what Satan has so eloquently and sympathetically described.

Even while Milton wrote, the spiritual atmosphere, religious, political, and artistic, had changed around him. To realise the change, one has only to turn from—

"Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit," &c.,

or —

"Hail Holy Light, Offspring of Heaven," &c.,

to—

"In thriving arts long since had Holland grown,        Crouching at home and cruel when abroad;         Scarce leaving us the means to claim our own;         Our King they courted, and our merchants awed."

The spirit of the age that was past, with its passionate pursuit of high if somewhat narrow ideals, religious, political, and artistic, is not reflected more clearly in Milton's elevated diction, and the imaginative structure of his poems, small and great, than that of the age of reason, toleration, and constitutional discussion is in Dryden's vigorous conversational style, and his alert and acute ratiocination in verse.