Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/361

 LATIN POEMS

��In the first half of the seventeenth cen- tury Latin was not only the accepted lan- guage for learned writing, and for writing addressed to a European audience, but in many cases it was spontaneously chosen for other and more intimate purposes. Europe, and especially England, was not yet far enough away from the revival of learning to have begun to throw off the spell of the classics. In the universities, of course, the prejudice in favor of Latin was overwhelm- ing, and he was an indifferent scholar who came away from his Alma Mater without having put that language almost as much at his command as the vernacular. In reading Milton's Latin poetry, therefore, we must bear in mind that it was not task- verse, nor mere language exercise, but that almost as a matter of course he put into it, rather than into his English verse, the first enthusiasm of his mind. Indeed, if it were not for the Nativity Ode, we should be justified in saying that before the Horton period began, he possessed a much greater facility and poetical power in Latin than iu English. As it is, we find in his Latin poetry that record of his poetic boyhood which we look for in vain among the meagre and (with one great exception) disappointing English verse of his early period.

The most obvious interest which attaches to the Latin poems is the definite autobio- graphic material which they contain. In the first elegy, for example, we learn of Milton's suspension from college, and of the manner in which he employed himself during his enforced vacation. In the sixth elegy occurs the first mention of the Na- tivity Ode, at the close of a noble statement of that poetic creed, making great art in-

��separable from great living, which he had already at the age of twenty-one fully de- veloped. Then, set in odd relief against this precocious solemnity, there follows in the seventh elegy an account of a thor- oughly boyish and na'ive love affair, a chance meeting in a London street with a girl whose eyes draw the soul out of his body, one of those lightning flashes from the clear sky of youth which tell of the summer passion suspended there. In the verses To Manso, we get the first announce- ment of Milton's intention to write an epic poem on the legendary history of Britain, in a connection suggestive of the manner in which the heroic poems of Italy had stimulated and made definite his vague poetical ambitions. In the Epitaphium Da- monis we learn of his decision, arrived at only after much debate and weighing of the odds, to write in English rather than in Latin.

More interesting even than these scraps of definite information, is the light thrown by the Latin poems upon Milton's relations with the people about him. The second elegy shows us the deep feeling of tender- ness which he continued to cherish for his tutor, Thomas Young, after their separa- tion; and furnishes a picture of that worthy Smectymnuan which seems to justify the feeling. The verses addressed to his father show us both how carefully and generously the elder Milton provided for his son's growth in all the graces and virtues of the intellect, and also how uneasy the old gentle- man became over the refusal of that son to employ his education toward any more defi- nite end than that of becoming a poet skilled to sing of time and eternity. Behind the son's protest against his elder's practicality

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