rld would not willingly let die.
His ideals react on us and raise us higher than we were. To him we may
say with Wordsworth:--

"Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free." [11]

SUMMARY

The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and political ideals.
James I. and Charles I. trampled on the laws and persecuted the
Puritans so rigorously that many of them fled to New England. Civil
war, in which the Puritans triumphed, was the result.

The Puritans, realizing that neither lands beyond the sea nor the New
Learning could satisfy the aspirations of the soul, turned their
attention to the life beyond. Bunyan's Pilgrim felt that the sole duty
of life was to fight the forces of evil that would hold him captive in
the City of Destruction and to travel in the straight and narrow path
to the New Jerusalem. Life became a ceaseless battle of the right
against the wrong. Hence, much of the literature in both poetry and
prose is polemical. Milton's _Paradise Lost_ is an epic of war between
good and evil. The book that had the most influence in molding the
thought of the time was the King James (1611) version of the _Bible_.

The minor prose deals with a variety of subjects. There are
argumentative, philosophical, historical, biographical, and
theological prose works; but only the fine presentation of nature and
life in _The Complete Angler_ interests the general reader of to-day,
although the grandeur of Milton's _Areopagitica_, the humor of Thomas
Fuller, the stately rhythmical prose of Sir Thomas Browne, and the
imagery and variety of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers.

Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ is the masterpiece of Puritan prose,
written in the simple, direct language of the 1611 version of the
_Bible_. The book is a prose epic of the journey of the Puritan
Christian from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem.

The Cavalier poets wrote much lyrical verse, mostly in lighter vein,
but the religious poets strike a deeper note. The work of these minor
poets is often a reflection of the Elizabethan lyrics of Donne and
Jonson.

John Milton, who has the creative power of the Elizabethans, is the
only great poet of the period. His greatest poems are _L'Allegro, Il
Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus,_ and _Paradise Lost_. In sublimity of
subject matter and cast of mind, in nobility of ideals, in expression
of the conflict