Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/22

 xiv THE LIFE OF MILTON

He sees nature neither with the spiritual insight of Wordsworth nor with the childlike absorption and awe of his contemporary Henry Vaughan. Standing out- side nature, he uses its spectacles as text and illustration of a mood which has its origin within. He does not even draw illustration exclusively from those sights which met his eye in the landscape about Horton, but borrows eclectically, wher- ever in visible nature or in scenes remembered from books he finds matter to his purpose. In any exact sense, therefore, these poems are not personal. In a larger sense they are profoundly so. They are the record of a serious, scholarly mind suddenly invaded in a propitious moment of youth by the beauty of external exist- ence, a beauty gay or sober, as chance may determine, but always richly solicit- ing. In a letter to Diodati, written from Horton, Milton says : " God . . . has instilled into me, if into any one, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labor ... is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpina, as it is my habit day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful . . . through all the forms and faces of things." Such pure sestheticism has on his lips a somewhat alien sound. We seem to be listening to the author of Endymion, rather than to the author of Comics.

Mark Pattison was the first of Milton's biographers to give sufficient emphasis to the pathos which these poems derive from the fact that in them, for the first and last time, Milton spoke in the free, joyous spirit of the time which was passing away forever. Even here, to be sure, the mood is chastened and objectified ; but taken broad and long, in their lightness, their grace, their eager response to sensuous beauty, these poems are of the great lyric age inaugurated by Spenser, though they show a sense of form and an economy of expression which Spenser's diffuser muse could not attain. When we look forward fifteen years and see Milton grimly sec- onding the movements of a party whose fanaticism crushed out the joy and poetry of life in England, cut down the Maypoles, closed the theatres, broke the stained- glass windows, and tore out the organ-pipes, the lines which celebrate the " jocund rebeck," the " well-trod stage," and the " storied windows richly dight," take on a peculiar significance. The man who was to be the pamphleteer champion and the bard of Puritanism is living here in the world of romantic chai-m which Crom- well's armies were to sweep away. The man who had written the Sonnet to the Nightingale was to turn that " small lute " into a trumpet whence he might blow soul-animating strains of strenuous applause.

Either shortly before or shortly after Milton left college he had been asked, prob- ably by young Henry Lawes, at that time gentleman of the Chapel Royal and one of the King's private musicians, to furnish a portion of the words for an entertain- ment to be presented before the Countess Dowager of Derby, at her country-seat of Harefield, by the younger members of her family. The libretto which Milton fur- nished is the fragment known as Arcades, or the Arcadians. Harefield lay only ten miles from Horton, and it is possible that Milton may have been present on the night when the actors in the little masque, disguised as shepherds and sylvan deities, and carrying torches in their hands, approached the aged countess, seated

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