s, weak creatures who accomplish
but the tiniest fragments of even such poor designs as we make for our
lives. There is something that uplifts us in the spectacle of the
triumphant completion of so great a plan as the life of Milton. We are
exalted by the thought that, after all, we are of the same flesh and
blood, nay, even of the same breed, as this wonderful man. To read the
_Paradise Lost_ is to realize, in the highest degree, how the poet's
imagination can impose a majestic order on the tumultuous confusion of
human speech and knowledge. To read its author's life is to realize,
with equally exalting clearness, how a strong man's will can so
victoriously mould a world of adverse circumstances that affliction,
defeat--nay, even the threatening shadow of death itself--are made the
very instruments by which he becomes that which he has, from the
beginning of his years, chosen for himself to be.

{89}

CHAPTER III

THE EARLIER POEMS

We think to-day of Milton chiefly as the author of _Paradise Lost_, as
we think of Wren as the builder of St. Paul's. And we are right. When
a man has been the creator of the only very great building in the world
which bears upon it from the first stone to the last the mark of a
single mind, his other achievements, even though they include
Greenwich, Hampton Court, Trinity College Library, and some fifty
churches, inevitably fall into the background. So when the world has
admitted that a poet has disputed the supreme palm of epic with Homer
and Virgil, it hardly cares to remember that he has also challenged all
rivals in such forms as the Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet.
_De minimis non curat_ might be applied to such cases without any very
violent extravagance. The first thought that must always rise to the
mind at the mention of Milton's name must be the stupendous achievement
of _Paradise Lost_.

Yet if Milton had been hanged at Tyburn {90} in 1660 he would still
unquestionably rank with the half-dozen greatest of the English poets.
Chaucer and Spenser would then have ranked after Shakspeare as higher
names than his: and possibly also Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. But
he could have feared no other rival: for Dryden is too much a mere man
of letters, Pope too much a mere wit, Byron too exclusively a
rhetorician, Tennyson too exclusively an artist, to rank with a man in
whom burned the divine fire of _Lycidas_ and the great Ode. What would
Milton's fame hav