Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/20

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��opening stanzas are disfigured by the conceits and ingenuities which had been made fashionable in England by the extraordinary poems of John Donne, seconded by the example of the Italian poet Marini. But as the poem progresses, Milton's imagination takes fire, the images gain in majesty and richness, and the language gathers a kingly confidence of rhythm and phrase, a shadowed but triumphant music, like the chanting of young seraphs awe-struck at their theme, which were altogether new in English verse. One has to know with some minuteness what poetry had been under Elizabeth and James, to realize the unique quality of voice in this Hymn. Taking the poem as a whole, one can scarcely agree with Hallam that it is " perhaps the finest ode in the English language," but again and again in its unequal lines Milton sends a herald voice into the wilderness, announcing in no dubious tones the advent of a master of song.

Clearly as we can now see Milton's gift announced in these early college efforts, they by no means stilled their author's restless desire to make that announcement more signal. The sonnet on his twenty-third birthday breathes deep dissatisfaction with his accomplishment up to that time. He grudges the " hasting days " which leave him songless, and thinking perhaps, as Mr. Gosse suggests, of young Abraham Cowley, whose marvellously precocious productions had already made him famous in his thirteenth year he speaks enviously of those " more timely happy spirits," the blossoming of whose genius had been seasonable. From this grudging mood he rises at the end into a tone of large resignation to the conditions under which he shall be called to work out his desires. When we consider what those conditions were to be, the words fall upon the ear with a special accent :

" Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task-master's eye."

It was in such a mood that Milton left Cambridge, after seven years' residence there. His father had intended him for the church, but such a career, although not yet rendered impossible by his broadening opinions, was distasteful because of the trammels it imposed. An academic career was no more alluring, even if it had been possible without taking orders. His discontent with the Cambridge tone comes out several times in his Latin verses and elsewhere. In his first elegy, al- luding to his rustication from college, he exclaims, " How ill does that place suit with poets ! " and in one of his pamphlets he makes disdainful allusion to the young graduates who " flutter off all unfledged into theology, having gotten of philology or philosophy scarce so much as a smattering," and who for theology " are content with just what is enough to enable them to patch up a paltry sermon." Upon Cambridge, therefore, and its " turba legentium prava " he turned his back, not however, to return to the house in Bread Street. His father, having acquired a competency, had retired to the little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire, seven-

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