Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/19

 a little wan to his boisterous companions, even if they had taken the trouble to understand it. This conviction was that he was appointed to some great work of poetic creation, and that such a work could come only as the outgrowth of a life of austerity. As yet it was merely the delicate austerity, the fastidious abstention, of an Elizabethan; but it was of a kind to turn easily into something sterner. That this double conviction had taken complete possession of Milton's mind before he left college, two passages from his verse of this period testify. One we find imbedded in a Latin epistle to Diodati (Elegy VI), who, sending him some verses, has excused himself for their lightness of tone by the fact that they were composed in the midst of country merry-making. Milton accepts the excuse, but declares that the poet who would sing of great themes, " of wars, and of Heaven under adult Jove, and of pious heroes, and leaders half-divine, singing now the holy counsels of the gods above, and now the realms profound where Cerberus howls, such a poet must live sparely, after the manner of the Samian teacher. Herbs must furnish him his innocent food; clear water in a beechen cup, sober draughts from the pure spring, must be his drink. His youth must be chaste and void of offence; his manners strict; his hands without stain. He shall be like a priest shining in sacred vestment, washed with lustral waters, who goes up to make augury before the jealous gods. . . . Yea, for the bard is sacred to the gods: he is their priest. Mysteriously from his lips and breast he breathes Jove."

There is in this perhaps an element of convention and of boyish bombast, but it is nevertheless the same thought which he expressed twenty years later, when he declared his early belief that " he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem . . . not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praiseworthy."

Again, in the fragment entitled At a Vacation Exercise in the College, after singing the praises of English speech, he goes on to speak of the kind of subject upon which he longs to try its powers. He would take his hearers,

It is a side illustration of the remarkable unity of Milton's purpose, that, translating the pagan terms here given into Biblical ones, this subject is the one to which, in old age, he reverted for his supreme effort.

He did not content himself with theory alone. During the seven years which he spent at Cambridge, he wrote, besides much Latin verse, a number of English poems. Of these only three or four are remarkable enough to have singled Milton out from the crowd of young poets and poeticules who then swarmed at the universities. First among these is of course the Hymn on the Nativity, written in the fifth year of his college residence, when he was twenty-one years old. The