buoyancy and saneness of the man which enables him, whilst bowing to the mystery of pain and loss, and thrilling to every sorrow, still to make the best of all human comfort, and get the most out of all human love. He rates at its highest value every gleam of friendship and affection. He is filled with ecstasy at the memory of joys which are not near him when he writes, but which soothe him out of the distance. Is there not a spirit, seizing upon and refreshing our spirit, in such an experience as comes forth glowing in the sweet poem which he calls " Consolation," where the man is extremely dejected, owing to a variety of causes, and suddenly remembers the glory which love sheds over life, and rises out of the winter of his discontent into the buoyancy of spring-time, remembering that although much has been taken away from him, there still remains one true heart in the world, and as long as there is one heart which beats in time with his, why should he despond?

What a lesson is this for many of us! You who have true friends—you who have living ones, who may not, perhaps, be near you now-what a glow should kindle up within you, when you think that

God strews your path with these, the flowers of affection! They will fade, no doubt, but they are not faded yet; you still have them here for your solace and dear remembrance:

"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since-cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoanéd moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before?

But if, the while, I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end."

II. 1600-1700.-You will not be surprised if, in passing from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, I open first at Milton, and take from him the key-note of that great period.

Milton went up to college at the time of the accession of Charles I. He lived through all that critical period, witnessed the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, witnessed the Restoration, and

he reflects in himself the close of one and the dawn of another great literary, social, and political epoch. He lived in the after-glow of Shakespeare's age; and although he might have seen Shakespeare in his very early youth, yet he escaped the affectations and conceits of the Elizabethan period, while retaining all its power and imagination. He was a Puritan of the Puritans, and yet no fanatic in his Puritanism. He was a Republican of the Republicans, and yet no lover of revolutions, and no bloodthirsty supporter of anarchy. He lived just before the period when the form of English poetry became stiff, accurate, and precise, but as cold as it was polished, in the works of Dryden and Pope. Milton caught a foretaste of that technical finish, without which no poetry is now acceptable as a work of art. But he never was soiled by a taint of the foul ribaldry and licentiousness which disgraced the poets of the Restoration.

He thus retained the finest human elements of the Elizabethan age, and united to them the art and refinement of an age the full development of which he did not live to see.

The distinguishing quality of Milton is hist

breadth.

Breadth is that indescribable impression produced in art by curves that form parts of very large circles; in music the same feeling is realized in listening to certain majestic phrases of Handel, Beethoven, and Wagner. Milton is solemn and grandiose, never dull, dreary, or pedantic; his poetry is always lit up, not only with an imaginative glow, but with an incomparable roll of glorious music, like the sound of the full organ in some cathedral aisle. If I read you a few lines expressive of the state of the world at the time of Christ's advent, when the great glory of the advent is represented as casting a morning radiance, like the rising sun, over the nations, how firm is the strain! how stately and rhythmical the cadences!

"No war, or battle's sound,

Was heard the world around:

The idle spear and shield were high up hung;
The hooked chariot stood

Unstain'd with hostile blood;

The trumpet spake not to the arméd throng;

And kings sat still, with awful eye,

As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light

His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kist,

Whispering new joys to the wild oceán

Who now hath quite forgot to rave,

While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.”

It may seem unnatural even to speak of Milton apart from the "Paradise Lost," but all fragments from that great work are excluded to-night because I am referring only to poems contained in a book of songs and lyrics. Yet does the "Paradise Lost" sound the key-note of his genius.

Milton was emphatically a religious poet. There breathes throughout his work an undertone of deep piety, which assumes a touching and personal solemnity when it comes to be associated with the great affliction of his life. He who so well described "flowers of all hue" and "trembling leaves," the "orient sun" and "the five wandering fires," was himself blind!

In the "Samson Agonistes" we have a wonderful and sympathetic record of his own statethe blind physical hero speaks for the blind intellectual giant; and another giant of emotional expression, Handel, has set to music the thoughts of his brother in the sister art.