the demolition of established things, the
clang of arms, and the streaming of blood, whether in the field or upon
the scaffold, a thinker and a writer.

There are times that naturally produce real, others that naturally produce
imitative poetry. Tranquil, stagnating times, produce the imitative; times
that rouse in man self-consciousnesses, produce the real. All great poetry
has a moral foundation. It is imagination building upon the great, deep,
universal, eternal human will. Therefore profound sympathy with man, and
profound intelligence of man, aided by, or growing out of, that profound
sympathy, is vital to the true poet. But in stagnating times both sympathy
with man sleeps, and the disclosure of man sleeps. Troubled times bring
out humanity--show its terrible depths--also its might and grandeur--both
ways its truth. A great poet seems to require his birth in an age when
there are about him great self-revelations of man, for his vaticination.
Moreover, his own particular being is more deeply and strongly stirred and
shown to him in such a time. But the moral tempest may be too violent for
poetry--as the Civil War of the Roses appeared to blast it and all
letters--that of the Parliament contrariwise. The intellect of Milton, in
the _Paradise Lost_, shows that it had seen "the giant-world enraged."

Happily for the literary fame of his country--for the solid exaltation in
these latter ages of the sublime art which he cultivated--for the lovers
of poetry who by inheritance or by acquisition speak the masculine and
expressive language which he still ennobled--for the serene fame of the
august poet himself--the political repose which a new change (the
restoration of detruded and exiled royalty to its ancestral throne) spread
over the land, by shutting up the public hopes of the civil and
ecclesiastical republican in despair, and by crushing his faction in the
dust, gave him back, in the visionary blindness of undecaying age, to "the
still air of delightful studies," in order that, in seclusion from all
"barbarous dissonance," he might achieve the work destined to him from the
beginning--not less than the greatest ever achieved by man.

Educated by such a strife to power--and not more sublimely gifted than
strenuously exercised--Milton had constantly carried in his soul the
twofold consciousness of the highest destination. He knew himself born a
great poet; and the names of great poets sounding through all time, rang
i