Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/146

116 but with the unparalleled Miltonic utterance, its author's polemic creeds of liberty and religion are conveyed throughout. He also stands foremost among the bards of qualified vision, by virtue of "Samson Agonistes," a classical drama in which he himself indubitably towers as the blind and fettered protagonist.

Milton's early verse is the flower of his passion The minor poems of Milton. for beauty and learning, and exquisite beyond that of any young English poet then or now, his pupil Keats excepted. Had he died after "Il Penseroso," "L'Allegro," and "Lycidas," he would have been mourned like Keats; for their perfection is to-day the model (though usually at second hand) of artists in English verse. In "Lycidas" he freed our rhythm from its first enslavement; its second lasted from Pope's time until the Georgian revival. One mark of the subjectivity of his early poems often has been noted,—they are none too realistic in their transcripts of nature. Milton, as in his greater work, looked inward, and drew his landscape from the Arcadian vistas thus beheld. Besides, he was such a master of the Greek, Latin, and Italian literatures as to be native to their idioms His self-expression in the great Puritan epic. and spirit. His more resolute self-assertion came in argument and song after experience of imposing national events and sore private calamities, when the man was ripe in thought, faith, suffering, and all that makes for character and exaltation. The universe, as he