able to remind us of his command of the gentler things of holiday and pathos, it remains the truth that it is in a sublime philosophic conception of life, rather than in the particular and intimate lives of men and women, that his interest chiefly lies and in the expression of which his mastery is most commonly used.

'How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stol'n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom show'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near,

And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That 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,

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

As ever in my great Task-master's eye.'

There at twenty-three was already the promise of
the
poet who in the full maturity of his power was
to learn how, by pure majesty of spirit and the very
magic of verse, to bring even angels into the range
of our human sympathies, as in:

'So spake the seraph Abdiel faithful found,
Among the faithless, faithful only he:
Among innumerable false unmoved,
Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,
His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;

Nor number, nor example with him wrought
To swerve from truth, or change his constant mind
Though single... .'

and who when he brought these faculties to a life still generalized, but nearer to our own experience, as at the end of 'Samson Agonistes,' could achieve a moving beauty which has never been excelled in English poetry:

'Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail

Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble....'

Although, more perhaps than most poets, Milton allowed a life of affairs to encroach upon his actual poetical composition, there is no poet of whom it can be more justly said that he devoted his life to poetry. Having proved his gifts in the early poems, he determined to wait until such time as he felt himself to be equipped for a work that should not only be profound in conception but massive in volume and architecture. 'Neither do I think it shame,' he writes in the 'Reason of Church Government urged against Prelatry' of 1641, 'to covenant with any knowing reader that, for some years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine... but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge... to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous art and affairs....' Through

those years of political and religious controversy his mind was fixed constantly upon the redemption of this promise. The result of all this was that when the works came they were upon a scale that can be no more lightly apprehended by the reader than they were lightly conceived by the poet. Before we can come to anything like the full significance of Milton's great poems we must read them steadily and we must read them whole.

We may for purposes of argument do very well in dividing poets up into schools, Classical, Romantic, Realist, and so forth, but when we come to the very great men we find that in some measure or another they have the best qualities of all these different kinds. Nowhere has the case for the socalled Classic as against the Romantic method been put more lucidly, than in Matthew Arnold's famous 'Preface' of 1853:

We can hardly at the present day understand what Menander meant, when he told a man who enquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the action of it in his mind. A modern critic would have assured him that the merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things which arose under his pen as he went along. We have poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of producing any total-impression. We have critics who seem to direct their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about the action,

not to the action itself. I verily think that the majority of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such a thing as a total-impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be demanded from a poet; they think the term a commonplace of metaphysical criticism. They will permit the Poet to select any action he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a shower of isolated thoughts and images. That is, they permit him to leave their poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies their rhetorical sense and their curiosity.

This is an admirable piece of æsthetic theory and it was a point that very much needed to be made, and for that matter still needs to be made to-day in view of the common practice of modern poetry. But the argument is one which when we come to the poets themselves in their poetry-even to Matthew Arnold in his own poetry - we find to need qualification. It is true that certain poets, chiefly lyric poets, do make good their claim to our remembrance almost entirely because of the occasional verbal felicities of which Arnold speaks, and they do not achieve, or, perhaps, even aim at, that 'total-impression' which the critic so rightly holds up to admiration. But this does not mean that the poets who are masters of proportion and form on the grand scale are indifferent to the appeal of those same verbal felicities. How, for example, would Arnold account for Keats in his

reckoning? The form of the 'Odes,' although it is of small dimensions, has decided grandeur and the 'total-impression' is emphatic and lasting. And yet Keats took the greatest pains to 'load every rift with ore.' There is hardly a line without some exquisite touch of the kind that Arnold, in his enthusiasm for classic purity, seems almost to censure. As I have pointed out, no poetry could be more suggestive in this matter than Arnold's own, where the general effect is always kept in view with scrupulous loyalty to the poet's belief, but where 'showers of isolated thoughts and images' are constantly breaking upon the design to our great profit.

In Milton this richness of phrase, beautiful even apart from its context, is constant. "The tann'd haycock in the mead,' 'The glowing violet,' 'Brisk as the April buds in Primrose season,' 'Beauty is Nature's brag,' 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' 'The marble air,' 'And from sweet

kernals prest She tempers dulcet creams,' 'And calm of mind all passion spent-' such things come to the eye on almost any page. Great and essential as the complete design is, it is not difficult ever to make Milton's inspiration clear by short passages, even phrases. But the design remains, to be discovered only by the patient and humble reader. Once to behold it, in all its lordly power and grace, is to rejoice in one of the sublime achievements of English character and of English poetry.