Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/80

66 a few passages in "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," an inevitable drop in the derivation, a depression such, as is human, and everything, from Dryden to "The Vanity of Human Wishes," follows, without violence and perhaps without wilful misappreciation. The poet Milton fathered, legitimately enough, an unpoetic posterity. Milton, therefore, who might have kept an age, and many a succeeding age, on the heights of poetry by lines like these—

by this, and by many and many another so divine—Milton justified also the cold excesses of his posterity by the example of more than one group of blank verse lines in his greatest poem. Manifestly the sanction is a matter of choice, and depends upon the age: the age of Crabbe found in Milton such ancestry as it was fit for.

Crabbe, then, was not a poet of poetry. But he came into possession of a metrical form charged by secondary poets with a contented second-class dignity that bears constant reference, in the way of respect rather than of imitation, to the state and nobility of Pope at his