ile, in
the hymn _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_, he had struck a note that
was his own, and it is not surprising that he left the poem on the
Passion unfinished, "nothing satisfied with what was begun."

As for the great Dean of St. Paul's, there is no evidence that Milton was
touched by him, or, for that matter, that he had read any of his poems.
In the verses written _At a Vacation Exercise_, he expressly sets aside

Those new-fangled toys and trimming slight
Which takes our late fantastics with delight;

and he very early came to dislike the fashionable conceits that ran riot
in contemporary English verse. A certain number of conceits, few and poor
enough, is to be found scattered here and there in his early poems. Bleak
Winter, for instance, is represented in three cumbrous stanzas, as the
slayer of the Fair Infant:--

For he, being amorous on that lovely dye
That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss,
But killed, alas! and then bewailed his fatal bliss.

In the lines on Shakespeare the monument promised to the dead poet is a
marvel of architecture and sculpture, made up of all his readers, frozen
to statues by the wonder and astonishment that they feel when they read
the plays. But perhaps the nearest approach to a conceit of the
metaphysical kind is to be found in that passage of _Comus_, where the
Lady accuses Night of having stolen her brothers:--

O thievish Night,
Why shouldst thou, but for some felonious end,
In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars
Which Nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps
With everlasting oil to give due light
To the misled and lonely traveller?

When Milton does fall into a vein of conceit, it is generally both
trivial and obvious, with none of the saving quality of Donne's remoter
extravagances. In Donne they are hardly extravagances; the vast
overshadowing canopy of his imagination seems to bring the most wildly
dissimilar things together with ease. To his unfettered and questioning
thought the real seems unreal, the unreal real; he moves in a world of
shadows, cast by the lurid light of his own emotions; they take grotesque
shapes and beckon to him, or terrify him. All realities are immaterial
and insubstantial; they shift their expressions, and lurk in many forms,
leaping forth from the most unlikely disguises, and vanishing as suddenly
as they came.

Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish;
A vapou