e mirth
might perhaps be permissible, is tenanted by grave livers, majestic, but
not sprightly. In _L' Allegro_ the morning song of the milk-maid is
"blithe," and the music of the village dance is "jocund." But Eve is
described as "jocund" and "blithe" only when she is intoxicated by the
mortal fruit of the tree; and the note of gaiety that is heard faintly,
like a distant echo, in the earlier poems, is never sounded again by
Milton.

So it is also with other things. The flowers scattered on the laureate
hearse of Lycidas make a brighter, more various, and withal a homelier
display than ever meets the eye in the Hesperian wildernesses of Eden. Or
take the world of fairy lore that Milton inherited from the
Elizabethans--a world to which not only Shakespeare, but also laborious
and arrogant poet-scholars like Jonson and Drayton had free right of
entry. Milton, too, could write of the fairies--in his youth--

With stories told of many a feat,
How Faery Mab the junkets eat.

But even in _Comus_ the most exquisite passage of fairy description is
put into the mouth of Comus himself, chief of the band of ugly-headed
monsters in glistering apparel--

The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,
Now to the moon in wavering morrice move;
And on the tawny sands and shelves
Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.
By dimpled brook and fountain-brim,
The wood-nymphs decked with daisies trim,
Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:
What hath night to do with sleep?

The song and the dance are broken off, never to be resumed, when the
staid footfall of the lady is heard approaching. Milton cannot draw
ugliness; it turns into beauty or majesty on his hands. Satan has a large
and enthusiastic party among readers of _Paradise Lost_. Comus, we are
told, stands for a whole array of ugly vices--riot, intemperance,
gluttony, and luxury. But what a delicate monster he is, and what a
ravishing lyric strain he is master of! The pleasure that Milton forswore
was a young god, the companion of Love and Youth, not an aged Silenus
among the wine-skins. He viewed and described one whole realm of pagan
loveliness, and then he turned his face the other way, and never looked
back. Love is of the valley, and he lifted his eyes to the hills. His
guiding star was not Christianity, which in its most characteristic and
beautiful aspects had no fascination for him, but rather that severe and
self-centred ideal of life and char