Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/24

 xvi THE LIFE OF MILTON

my wings for a flight." For broad flight he was not yet ready, and for lesser ones the sting of occasion was lacking, until the autumn of 1637. Then news came of the sinking of a ship in the Irish Sea, and the loss of all on board, including Edward King, a fellow of Christ's and an old college-mate of Milton's. King's Cambridge friends determined to issue a little volume of commemorative verse, to which Milton, as a recent graduate, was asked to contribute. It is an odd experi- ence now to turn over the pages of this little volume, and, after reading the well- meaning heaviness of which it is mainly composed, to come suddenly at the end upon the large threnodic rhythm of the opening lines of Lycidas. Lycidas has been called by so competent a critic as the late Mr. Pattison, the highwater mark, not only of Milton's genius, but of English lyric poetry. Superlatives are danger- ous, and never more so than when dealing with work of a commanding order. It is perhaps more to our purpose to note what the same critic has suggestively pointed out, that in this poem the world of Milton's youth and the world of his manhood meet. The general tone of the lament is indistinguishable from that of the ordinary pastoral threnodies of the school of Spenser. There is the same air of deliberate convention, the same pensive beauty, the same delicious melancholy grace in the wearing of the rue. But once past the induction we come upon lines which apprise us that we are in the presence of a sterner moral conception than ever troubled the smooth pipes of the early pastoralists. In the passage beginning

" Last came and last did go The pilot of the Galilean lake,"

there is a " smothered and suspended menace," a passion of purification, which was soon to wreak itself upon everything in Church and State for which the House of Stuart stood, and to sweep away in its blind zeal much that was beautiful and desirable. It was to take, among other good things, that very gift of pure melody which was given to Milton's youth. He was to come out of the struggle strength- ened to grapple with a vast theme, but stiffened and shorn of grace. He was to live to build language into large harmonic masses, intricate and solemn fugues, but never to recapture that simple singing voice which charms us in the poems written during his " long holiday " at Horton.

Ill

ITALIAN JOURNEY, 1638-1639

TOWARD the end of his fifth year at Horton, Milton began to feel the cramping intellectual conditions of life in the country and to think of taking chambers in London. This project he soon abandoned for the wider one of foreign travel. The expenses of the trip were borne by his father, with that generous acquiescence which he had always shown in his son's plans of self-improvement. After a short stay in Paris Milton proceeded to Italy, then the seat of a decaying but still splen- did civilization, and even richer then than now in beauty.

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