a finer humility, built on
truth, he was not without his share. The truly humble man may be a
genius and may know it and may never affect to deny it: he may know
that he has done great things, far greater than have been done by the
men he sees around him: but he is not judging himself by the standard
of other men: he has another standard, that of "the perfect witness of
all-judging Jove," that of "as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye," and
of that he knows how very far he has fallen short. Of this nobler
humility Milton had something all his life and in his youth much. It
is this which reconciles the apparent inconsistency between his many
proud {93} confessions that he knows himself to be a man called to do
great things and his reluctance to let the world see what he had
already done: between his keeping _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ ten
years unpublished and his preserving and ultimately publishing almost
everything he had ever written, even to scraps of boyish and
undergraduate verse. From one point of view his best was nothing: from
the other, more than equally true, the humblest line that had come from
his pen had received a passport to immortality.

What does the famous volume contain? It opens with the noble _Ode on
the Nativity_, as if to give the discerning reader invincible proof in
the first twenty lines put before him that the proud words of the
publisher's preface were amply justified. "Let the event guide itself
which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the
light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous
Spenser wrote; whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated
as sweetly excelled. Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their
worth, I am not fearful to expose them to thy exactest perusal." So
the preface ends: and then what follows is--

"This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King,
{94}
Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace."

_Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo_. No one had ever written
such English verse as this before: no one ever would again. Here was a
poet, writing at the age of twenty-one, for whom it was evident that no
theme could be so high that he could not find it fit utterance. Fit
and a