Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/362

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��LATIN POEMS

��there is evident a filial relation of unusual depth and sweetness. Again, in the verses to Salzillo and to Manso, and in the Epitaph- iwn Damonis, we get many entertaining glimpses of the friendships which Milton made in Italy. Above all, we get from the Latin poems, as a whole, an understanding of the one great friendship of Milton's life, that with Charles Diodati. The lament upon Diodati's untimely death not only is an exquisite work of art, beautiful with the delicate, pure beauty of the Sicilian lyrists, but it also has a touching humanity very rare in Milton's work.

This latter quality suggests another interest possessed by the Latin poems, namely, the indirect information they con- vey concerning Milton's character during its plastic period. His enthusiasm for the theatre, his eager holiday interest in the crowds thronging the London parks and suburban pleasure - places, the rapturous praise of English girls to which he is moved by the sight of groups of them promenading in holiday attire, his instan- taneous surrender before one pair of chal- lenging eyes, all this shows a side of Milton unfamiliar to those who know him only through his English verse. The sixth elegy, sent to Diodati at some country- house where Christmas was being cele- brated in good old English fashion, has a delightful geniality, not spoiled but only thrown into relief by the mood of strenu- ousness with which the poem closes. The unrestrained fervor of the lines On the Approach of Spring surprises us until we learn from a dozen places in the poems of this period that the lax, voluptuous Ovid was Milton's darling poet among the Latins. Along with these hints of character, we get others of a more familiar kind, the Puri- tan boy's indignation over the fact that a godly minister like Young should be com- pelled to seek sustenance in a foreign coun- try; the Puritan youth's dogma of asceti- cism as a preparation for the life of poetry; the young bachelor's self-confidence, tinge-

��ing the real humility of his feeling toward his father and the venerable Manso with a hint of superb intellectual arrogance be- hind; and, in the Ode to Rouse, the adult poet's weariness with the wranglings and hoarse disputes of his generation. Milton is Milton still; a knowledge of his Latin poetry can hardly disturb our fundamental conceptions of him; but it is safe to say that no one who is unfamiliar with that poetry can form a true idea of his youth. With only the English poems and letters to judge from, we are left with an uncom- fortable sense that young Milton was a young prig; the real dignity of his moral attitude escapes us, because we do not see the opposing forces which he had to over- come.

As to the artistic qualities of this poetry, it would not be profitable to speak here at length. In the main they are qualities of delicacy and felicitotisness rather than of strength. They bear a relation to Milton's later English poetry roughly analogous to that which Tennyson's early lyrical experi- ments bear to his adult work. In them Milton learned his trade of poet, at least on its technical and imitative side. The habit of assimilation, the power to freight his lines with the accumulated riches of past thought, we see here in the making, and we see also how the habit of conveying commonplace thought in a sonorous and magniloquent medium fostered that large Miltonic diction, which was so noble in Milton's own hands, and so intolerably hol- low in the hands of his eighteenth-century imitators. It would be wrong, however, to think of these poems as consciously disci- plinary. When they were written, the chances seemed even that Milton's main work as poet would be in Latin rather than in English; they represent sincere creative effort, and offer many rare intrin- sic beauties in spite of their immaturity.

To see most clearly what Milton could have accomplished in neo-Latin poetry, we must turn to the few pieces written after his

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