poem, though we see no objection to it here; but of this we are quite sure, that there is no inconsistency or natural repugnance between this poetical and religious faith in the same mind. To the understanding, the belief of the one is incompatible with that of the other; but in the imagination, they not only may, but do constantly co-exist. We will venture to go farther, and maintain, that every classical scholar, however orthodox a Christian he may be, is an honest Heathen at heart. This requires explanation. Whoever, then, attaches a reality to any idea beyond the mere name, has, to a certain extent, (though not an abstract), an habitual and practical belief in it. Now, to any one familiar with the names of the personages of the Heathen mythology, they convey a positive identity beyond the mere name. We refer them to something out of ourselves. It is only by an effort of abstraction that we divest ourselves of the idea of their reality; all our involuntary prejudices are on their side. This is enough for the poet. They impose on the imagination by all the attractions of beauty and grandeur. They come down to us in sculpture and in song. We have the same associations with them, as if they had really been; for the belief of the fiction in ancient times has produced all the same effects as the reality could have done. It was a reality to the minds of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and through them it is reflected to us. And, as we shape towers, and men, and armed steeds, out of the broken clouds that glitter in the distant horizon, so, throned above the ruins of the ancient world, Jupiter still nods sublime on the top of blue Olympus, Hercules leans upon his club, Apollo has not laid aside his bow, nor Neptune his trident; the sea-gods ride upon the sounding waves, the long procession of heroes and demi-gods passes in endless review before us, and still we hear

-The Muses in a ring

Aye round about Jove's altar sing:

Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.'

If all these mighty fictions had really existed, they could have done no more for us! We shall only give one other passage from Lycidas ; but we flatter ourselves that it will be a treat to our readers, if they are not already familiar with it. It is the passage which contains that exquisite description of the flowers:

'Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past

That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells, and flow'rets of a thousand hues.

Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers;
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freak'd with jet,
The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureat hearse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Waft far away, where'er thy bones are hurl'd,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world;
Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,

Where the great vision of the guarded mount
Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold,
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth,
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.'

Dr. Johnson is very much offended at the introduction of these Dolphins; and indeed, if he had had to guide them through the waves, he would have made much the same figure as his old friend Dr. Burney does, swimming in the Thames with his wig on, with the water-nymphs, in the picture by Barry at the Adelphi.

There is a description of flowers in the Winter's Tale, which we shall give as a parallel to Milton's. We shall leave it to the reader to decide which is the finest; for we dare not give the preference. Perdita says,

Here's flowers for you,

Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram,
The marygold, that goes to bed with the sun,
And with him rises weeping; these are flowers
Of middle summer, and I think, they're given

To men of middle age. Y'are welcome.

'Camillo. I should leave grazing, were I of your flock, And only live by gazing.

'Perdita.

Out, alas!

You'd be so lean, that blasts of January

Would blow you through and through. Now, my fairest friend,
I would I had some flowers o' th' spring, that might

Become your time of day: O Proserpina,

For the Яowers now, that, frighted, you let fall

From Dis's waggon! Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower de lis being one. O, these I lack
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o'er and o'er.'

Dr. Johnson's general remark, that Milton's genius had not room to show itself in his smaller pieces, is not well-founded. Not to mention Lycidas, the Allegro, and Penseroso, it proceeds on a false estimate of the merits of his great work, which is not more distinguished by strength and sublimity than by tenderness and beauty. The last were as essential qualities of Milton's mind as the first. The battle of the angels, which has been commonly considered as the best part of the Paradise Lost, is the worst. W. H.

No. 11.] ON MILTON'S VERSIFICATION

[AUG. 20, 1815.

MILTON's works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn to Fame. His religious zeal infused its character into his imagination; and he devotes himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation "of his genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the good of his country. He does not write from casual impulse, but after a severe examination of his own strength, and with a determination to leave nothing undone which it is in his power to do. He always labours, and he almost always succeeds. He strives to say the finest things in the world, and he does say them. He adorns and dignifies his subject to the utmost. He surrounds it with all the possible associations of beauty or grandeur, whether moral, or physical, or intellectual. He refines on his descriptions of beauty, till the sense almost aches

at them, and raises his images of terror to a gigantic elevation, that 'makes Ossa like a wart.' He has a high standard, with which he is constantly comparing himself, and nothing short of which can satisfy him:

Sad task, yet argument

Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued,

If answerable stile I can obtain.

Unless an age too late, or cold

Climate, or years, damp my intended wing.'

Milton has borrowed more than any other writer; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer. The power of his mind is stamped on every line. He is a writer of centos, and yet in originality only inferior to Homer. The quantity of art shews the strength of his genius; so much art would have overloaded any other writer. Milton's learning has all the effect of intuition. He describes objects of which he had only read in books, with the vividness of actual observation. His imagination has the force of nature. He makes words tell as pictures:

And again:

"Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat
Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks
Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams.'

'As when a vulture on Imaus bred,

Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
Dislodging from a region scarce of prey

To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids

1

On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springs
Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;

But in his way lights on the barren plains

Of Sericana, where Chineses drive

With sails and wind their cany waggons light.'

Such passages may be considered as demonstrations of history. Instances might be multiplied without end. There is also a decided tone in his descriptions, an eloquent dogmatism, as if the poet spoke from thorough conviction, which Milton probably derived from his spirit of partisanship, or else his spirit of partisanship from the natural firmness and vehemence of his mind. In this Milton resembles Dante, (the only one of the moderns with whom he has anything in common), and it is remarkable that Dante, as well as Milton, was a political partisan. That approximation to the severity of impassioned

prose which has been made in vejen u Miton's poetry, is one of ins cher excelences. It has been suggested, that the vividness with which be describes site to es, myn be ewing to their having acquired a greater gs min fer the privation of sight; but we ind the same palpacieness und schtry in the descriptions which occur in his early poems. There is, indeed, the same depth of impression in his descripcions of the objects of the other senses. Minod had as much of what is meant as any poet. He forms the most intense conceptions of things, and then embodies them by a single stroke of his pen. Force of style is perhaps his first excellence. Hence he stimulures us most in the reading, and less afterwards.

It has been sund that Miton's ideas were musical rather than picturesque, but this observation is not true, in the sense in which it was ment. The ear, indeed, predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately afected, and because the gige of music blends more immetinely with, and forms a more natural accompaniment to, the variable and indefinite associations of ideas conveyed by words. But where the associations of the imagination are not the principal thing, the individual object is given by Milton with equal force and beauty. The strongest and best proof of this, as a characteristic power of his mind, is, that the persons of Adım and Eve, of Satan, etc., are always accompanied, in our imagination, with the grandeur of the naked figure; they convey to us the ideas of sculpture. As an instance, take the following:

-He soon

Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand,

The same whom John saw also in the sen:

His back was turned, but not his brightness hid;

Of beaming sunny rays a goiden tiar

Circled his head, nor less his locks behind

Illustrious on his shoulders fledged with wings

Lay waving round; on some great charge employ`d

He seem'd, or fix'd in cogitation deep.

Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hope

To find who might direct his wand'ring flight

To Paradise, the happy seat of man,

His journey's end, and our beginning woe.
But first he casts to change his proper shape,
Which else might work him danger or delay:
And now a stripling cherub he appears,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb
Suitable grace diffus'd, so well he feign'd:
Under a coronet his flowing hair