Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/48

 POEMS WRITTEN AT SCHOOL AND AT COLLEGE

��and bewildered by contact with a perverted style.

Even thus hampered, however, his genius could not help sending out an occasional herald voice ; and we do not have to look far to find exceptions to all that has just been said concerning these early efforts. Curiously enough, the very first line of his recorded composition,

" When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son,"

written at fifteen, has the true Miltonic gravity and largeness. In the "Vacation Exercise," in close connection with the long- ing there expressed to use his native lan- guage in some great poetic emprise, we find an expression of his disgust at the in- genuities so dear to the heart of the " meta- physicals," those

" New-fangled toys and trimming slight, Which take our late fantastics with delight."

His lines on Shakespeare show an appre- ciation of that sane master completely at variance with the stiff exaggeration of its concluding verses, which are quite in the concettistic spirit. It should not go uu- chronicled either, that in the lines on the death of Hobson, the University carrier, Milton showed at least a seasonable desire to be humorous.

But it is the hymn On the Morning of Christ's Nativity which allows us to read his early title clear. A good deal of reserva- tion, it is true, has to be made even here. The poem has to an extreme degree the Jacobean vice of diffuseness, possibly caught in this instance from the beautiful religious epic of Giles Fletcher, Christ's Victory and Triumph on Earth and in Heaven; the metre of the induction is certainly imitated from that poem, and an occasional quaint dulcity of expression, such as,

" See how from far upon the Eastern road The star-led Wizards haste with odours sweet,"

seems as certainly caught from it. The opening description of Nature's attempt to hide her sin under a covering of snow at

��the moment of the Saviour's birth, the sun's shamed reluctance to rise because of the presence of a greater Sun, and the drolly prosaic figure in the next stanza from the last, where the sun is pictured in bed, with cloud curtains drawn about him and his chin pillowed upon a wave, over all this is the trail of affectation and mistake. In places, too, where the thought becomes more sincere, the imagery remains unplas- tic. The descent of " meek-eyed Peace," for example, in the third stanza, reminds one of the stage-contrivances of a court masque ; and the figures of Truth, Justice, and Mercy, in stanza fifteen, have the same dis- illusioning suggestion. But when all reser- vation is made, and all the unvitalized mat- ter counted out, there remains enough true poetry in the Hymn to have furnished forth a lesser man for immortality. Scattered lines and even stanzas of splendid utter- ance occur throughout, but the grand man- ner begins in earnest with the nineteenth stanza:

" The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words de- ceiving,

Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos

leaving.

No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from his prophetic cell.

" The lonely mountains o'er And the resounding shore A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; From haunted spring, and dale Edg&d with poplar pale, The parting Genius is with sighing sent;

With flower-inwoven tresses torn | The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thick- ets mourn."

These and the four stanzas which follow are not only magnificent and flawless, they are also pitched in a key before unheard in England, and colored with the light of a new mind.

The Hymn shows Milton's youthful gen-.

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