is a craving for human companionship; and the narrator, who felt none, denies it. Even with Dante the student can walk in awed fellowship through the Inferno. He is aware of a soul shuddering, fevered, at the agonies it has created, and quakes and burns in company. Over the personality of Milton, in Heaven, in Hell, among the flowers of Eden themselves, a cloud perpetually hangs, radiant it may be, but impenetrable, humiliating.

It is a profound, an abiding disappointment. I can understand how, through it, to some, great minds too, Paradise Lost has seemed to be a failure, a brilliant failure. Of less account is the complaint that it occupied powers which might have produced a series of lovely sisters to the Arcades, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso. This I have been tempted myself to regret. But I know that the sentiment is unreasonable. In the first place, it was a choice between something and nothing. The flowering time of ethereal lyrics was over for Milton. Moreover, a hundred, if that be an imaginable vision, like them could never have supplied the place of the single epic. Paradise Lost, with banded piety for its body-guard, was a pillar of fire keeping alive, throughout the roamings of Johnson's dilapidated Poets about their dreary desert of some hundred years, the sacred instinct of inspired verse.

With all the blurs, it is a mine of fancy, a thicket of beauties. Observe the pomp of rhythm, as various as it is majestic, its billowy ebb and flow. Where in the Prometheus, the Inferno, Macbeth, is there the superior of Satan's encounter with Death?

the Shape

If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb:

Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,

For each seemed either-black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,

And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.11

Is there a charge of deficiency in tenderness? Tenderness clothes Eve, always lovely, always heart-innocent, in her Garden. It softens the ache of exile for her and Adam :

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.12

It steeps in celestial pity-though for himself-the swanlike chant of the old man-old for a poet of his century, and of his troubles, at fifty-nine-over his perished eyesight. The lament-repeated in a sternly heroic sonnet-is rival of the moonlit rhapsody of Lorenzo and Jessica for primacy of melody in English blank verse :

Hail, holy Light! Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit, nor sometimes forget
Those other two equalled with me in fate,
So were I equalled with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers, as the wakeful bird

Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank

Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.13

From the same deep well of pathos-if similarly selfcentred-rose the tears which watered the funeral-wreath of the girl-wife, little more than bride, dead in child-birth: Methought I saw my late espoused saint

Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,

Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save,

And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.

Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined

So clear as in no face with more delight.

But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.14

These, it is true, were involuntary sobs extorted by positive heartaches. They were not Byronic confidences exchanged with the outside world, or even with a circle of admirers. They were no appeals for condolence. Still, with their echoes in our ears, we well may mourn the more for the general rigour of self-repression. It is the secret of the failure-this a positive failure, as, notwith

standing Coleridge's admiration, it seems to me-of Paradise Regained. The Christ Milton might have painted had he given the rein to his natural instinct of Divine compassion! As it is, the one grace, accordant with its Quaker genesis, which the composition possesses, is that of an equably calm and chill winter sunset. The poet's purity, his moral dignity, too exalted for visible emotion, were not similarly out of tune with the marvellous tale of the fall of Angels and Man. Flaws there bear testimony at all events to a Titanic consciousness of power. In it, from it, over it shines a colossal character. If it was no habit of Milton's to ask for sympathy, if he moves on a plane above vulgar admiration, as little does he condescend to seek to excite curiosity by hiding himself. Simply, his was become

a hermit soul. Yet it remains one, when visible, worthy in the highest degree of contemplation. We should find it hard to name its equal for personal grandeur in English literature.

The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited by David Masson. Macmillan & Co., 1874.

1 L'Allegro.

4 Arcades, Song, ii.

2 Il Penseroso.

3

Song on May Morning.

5 Letters of Wotton, ed. L. Pearsall-Smith. Two vols. Henry Frowde, Clarendon Press, 1907.

• Comus, Song.

Comus, Spirit" Epilogizes ".

8 On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, xx.

9 Lycidas.

10 To the Nightingale: Sonnets, i.

13 Ibid., Book III, vv. 21-50.

11 Paradise Lost, Book II, vv. 666-73. 12 Ibid., Book XII, vv. 645-9.

14 On his Deceased Wife: Sonnets, xxiii.

WILLIAM BROWNE, OF TAVISTOCK

1591-1643?

THE Confessed disciple of Sidney, with

and of

His shepherd's lay, yet equaliz'd of none,1

Divinest Spenser, heav'n-bred, happy Muse! 2

a master of Keats; author of poems, golden apples of the Hesperides, had he but suffered them to ripen on the bough. Never was a more unmistakable poet so given to tantalizing admirers with the promise of beauties, which he insists upon expanding to tedium, or into caricatures. Nature equipped him for a poet, and, I can only suppose, as in some other cases, overdid her work. She supplied either an excess of facility, or too much modesty for him to understand that he was his proper self only when at his highest. What that was he probably never measured, whether for good or for ill. If the possession of a critical faculty highly developed checks inspiration, the utter want of the gift is almost equally injurious. Browne cannot have had it in any degree; or he would not continually have spoilt his choicest verse by tasteless additions. Thus, whether the earlier part of the famous epitaph on Lady Pembroke be his, or, as I think it, by Ben Jonson, he at all events went far towards marring it by the second half.3 His tendency similarly to blur his undisputed work with his own sleeve is so habitual that the falling-off is even an argument in the doubtful instance for his authorship. This absence of the