conscious how far they transcend them in their august beauty and seraphic grandeur, which approach nearer to the lofty and fervid sublimity of the inspired Hebrew poets than those of any other mortal.
Milton had deeply imbued himself with the poetic spirit, imagery, and expression of the prophetic bards, as well as with the knowledge of those of Greece and Rome; and he brought to bear an immense mass of varied learning on his subject with a power of appropriation that gave to it a new and wonderful life instead of the aspect of pedantry. The names of people and places which he moulds into his diction seem to open up to the imagination regions of unimagined grandeur and beauty amid strains of solemnest music; and the descriptions of scenery, such as abound in Comus, Lycidas, and the Arcades, as well as those diffused through both the "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," are like the most exquisite glimpses into the most fair and solitary landscapes, breathing every rural fragrance, and have with all rural sounds and harmonies.
Milton's Birthplace, Westminster.
Miltons Burial-place, Cripplegate.
But it was when he was old, and poor, and blind, and living among the hatred and the ribald obscenity of the restoration that he had scaled those sublime altitudes of genius, and seemed to walk rather on the celestial hills amid their pure and glorious inhabitants, than surrounded by the rankest impurities and basest natures of earth. It was when
His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,
when he had fallen on evil days, that he had alone allowed himself leisure to work out these the earliest of his aspirations. Long before, when he had returned from his pleasant sojourn in Italy, where he saw Galileo in his prison, and was himself received and honoured by the greatest men of the country, as in anticipation of his after glory, and was now engaged in defending the sternest measures of the republicans, that in his "Reasons of Church Government urged against Prelacy" he unfolded the grand design of his master work, but kept it self-denyingly in his soul till he had done his duty to his country. The views which he cherished in his literary ambition are as exalted in their moral grandeur as his genius was in its native character. These were, he said, "That what the greatest and choicest arts of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might do for mine, not caring to be named once abroad, though perhaps I could attain unto that, but content me with these British islands as my world." At this period, it seems, he had not made up his mind whether he should adopt "the epic form, as exemplified by Homer, Virgil, and Tasso; or the dramatic, wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign; or in the style of those magnificent odes and hymns of Pindarus and Callimachus, not forgetting that of all those kinds of writing the highest models are to be found in the Holy Scriptures in the book of Job, in the Song of Solomon, and the apocalypse of St. John, in the grand songs interspersed throughout the law and the prophets." But in one thing he was fixed—that the work should be one "not raised from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher fury of some rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained by the invocation of dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases."
So prayed, more gaining than he asked, the bard,
Holiest of men.
