regardless, and unprofitable sin of curiosity should be able to withhold?" And what of the "desire of honour and repute and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true scholar?" That his correspondent may the better understand him, he encloses a "Petrarchean sonnet," recently composed, on his twenty-third birthday, not one of his best, but precious as the first of his frequent reckonings with himself:

"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career;
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near;

And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
Than some more timely-happy spirits indu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,

It shall be still in strictest measure even

To that same lot, however mean or high,

Towards which Time leads me, and the Will of Heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."

The poetical temperament is especially liable to misgiving and despondency, and from this Milton evidently was not exempt. Yet he is the same Milton who proclaimed a quarter of a century afterwards—

"" I
argue not

Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot

Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward."

There is something very fine in the steady resolution

with which, after so fully admitting to himself that his promise is yet unfulfilled, and that appearances are against him, he recurs to his purpose, frankly owning the while that the gift he craves is Heaven's, and his only the application. He had received a lesson against over-confidence in the failure of his solitary effort up to this time to achieve a work on a large scale. To the eighth and last stanza of his poem, "The Passion of Christ," is appended the note: "This subject the author finding to be above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished." It nevertheless begins nobly, but soon deviates into conceits, bespeaking a fatigued imagination. The "Hymn on the Nativity," on the other hand, begins with two stanzas of far-fetched prettiness, and goes on ringing and thundering through strophes of ever-increasing grandeur, until the sweetness of Virgin and Child seem in danger of being swallowed up in the glory of Christianity; when suddenly, by an exquisite turn, the poet sinks back into his original key, and finally harmonizes his strain by the divine repose of concluding picture worthy of Correggio:

"But see, the Virgin blest

Hath laid the Babe to rest;

Time is our tedious song should here have ending;
Heaven's youngest-teemed star

Hath fixed her polished car,

Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending;
And all about the courtly stable

Bright harnessed Angels sit in order serviceable."

In some degree this magnificent composition loses force in our day from its discordance with modern senti

ment. We look upon religions as members of the same family, and are more interested in their resemblances than their antagonisms. Moloch and Dagon themselves appear no longer as incarnate fiends, but as the spiritual counterparts of antediluvian monsters; and Milton's treatment of the Olympian deities jars upon us who remember his obligations to them. If the most Hebrew of modern poets, he still owed more to Greece than to Palestine. How living a thing Greek mythology was to him from his earliest years appears from his college vacation exercise of 1628, where there are lines which, if one did not know to be Milton's, one would declare to be Keats's. Among his other compositions by the time of his quitting Cambridge are to be named the superb verses, "At a Solemn Music," perhaps the most perfect expression of his ideal of song; the pretty but over fanciful lines, “On a fair Infant dying of a cough;" and the famous panegyric of Shakespeare, a fancy made impressive by dignity and sonority of utterance.

With such earnest of a true vocation, Milton betook himself to retirement at Horton, a village between Colnbrook and Datchet, in the south-eastern corner of Buckinghamshire, county of nightingales, where his father had settled himself on his retirement from business. This retreat of the elder Milton may be supposed to have taken place in 1632, for in that year he took his clerk into partnership, probably devolving the larger part of the business upon him. But it may have been earlier, for in 1626 Milton tells Diodati—

"Nos quoque lucus habet vicina consitus ulmo,
Atque suburbani nobilis umbra loci."

And in a college declamation, which cannot have been later than 1632, he "calls to witness the groves and rivers, and the beloved village elms, under which in the last past summer I remember having had supreme delight with the Muses, when I too, among rural scenes and remote forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated through a hidden eternity."

D

CHAPTER II.

OCTOR JOHNSON deemed "the knowledge of nature half the task of a poet," but not until he had written all his poetry did he repair to the Highlands. Milton allows natural science and the observation of the picturesque no place among the elements of a poetical self-education, and his practice differs entirely from that which would in our day be adopted by an aspirant happy in equal leisure. Such an one would probably have seen no inconsiderable portion of the globe ere he could resolve to bury himself in a tiny hamlet for five years. The poems which Milton composed at Horton owe so much of their beauty to his country residence as to convict him of error in attaching no more importance to the influences of scenery. But this very excellence suggests that the spell of scenery need not be exactly proportioned to its grandeur.

The beauties of Horton are characterized by Professor Masson as those of "a rich, teeming, verdurous flat, charming by its appearance of plenty, and by the goodly show of wood along the fields and pastures, in the nooks where the houses nestle, and everywhere