contemporaries,
and appealed to the coming age--both preferred fame to reputation--both
during their life-time met with obloquy, which crushed them not--both
combined intellect with imagination, in equal proportions--both were
persevering and elaborate artists, as well as inspired men--both were
unwieldy in their treatment of commonplace subjects. Neither possessed a
particle of humor; nor much, if any, genuine wit. Both were friends of
liberty and of religion--their genius was "baptized with the Holy Ghost
and with fire."

But there were differences and disparities as manifold. Milton was a
scholar of the first magnitude; Wordsworth no more than respectable in
point of learning; Milton may be called a glorious book-worm; Wordsworth
an insect feeding on trees; Milton was London born and London bred;
Wordsworth from the provinces; Milton had a world more sympathy with
chivalry and arms--with the power and the glory of this earth--with
human and female beauty--with man and with woman, than Wordsworth.
Wordsworth loved inanimate nature better than Milton, or at least, he
was more intimately conversant with her features; and has depicted them
with more minute accuracy, and careful finish. Milton's love for liberty
was a wiser and firmer passion, and underwent little change;
Wordsworth's veered and fluctuated; Milton's creed was more definite and
fixed than Wordsworth's, and, perhaps, lay nearer to his heart;
Wordsworth shaded away into a vague mistiness, in which the Cross at
times was lost; Milton had more devotion in his absence from church than
Wordsworth in his presence there; Wordsworth was an "idler in the land;"
Milton an incessant and heroic struggler.

As writers, while Wordsworth attains to lofty heights, with an
appearance of effort; Milton is great inevitably, and inhales with
pleasure the proud and rare atmosphere of the sublime; Wordsworth _comes
up_ to the great--Milton _descends_ on it; Wordsworth has little
ratiocinative, or rhetorical power; Milton discovers much of
both--besides being able to grind his adversaries to powder by the hoof
of invective, or to toss them into the air on the tusks of a terrible
scorn; Wordsworth has produced many sublime lines, but no character
approaching the sublime; Milton has reared up Satan to the sky--the most
magnificent structure in the intellectual world; Wordsworth's
philosophic vein is more subtle, and Milton's more masculine and strong;
Wordsworth has written much