lso peculiar to himself. The peculiar Miltonic note which none of
his innumerable imitators have ever caught for more than a few lines,
which he himself never in all his works loses for more than a moment,
is instantly struck. As Mr. Mackail has said, "there is not a square
inch of his poetry from first to last of which one could not
confidently say, 'This is Milton and no one else.'" One may even go
further than Mr. Mackail. For he seems to make an exception where
certainly none is needed. He is justly insisting that one of the most
remarkable things about Milton is that, while English poetry spoke one
language in his youth and another in his age, he himself spoke neither.
His "accent and speech" alike in _Lycidas_ and in _Paradise Lost_ {95}
are his own, and in marked contrast to those of contemporary poets.
But here Mr. Mackail adds the qualification "if we exclude a few slight
juvenile pieces of his boyhood and those metrical versions of the
Psalms in which he elected not to be a poet." He asserts, that is,
that neither in the Psalms nor in the "juvenile pieces" is Milton
characteristically himself and that in the Psalms he is not a poet at
all. And no one will care to deny that many of the versions of the
Psalms have little Milton and less poetry in them. But is this true of
all? And in particular is it true of the paraphrase of Psalm cxxxvi.
which, with its companion version of Psalm cxiv. is the most "juvenile"
of all? A boy of fifteen has not usually much power of "electing" to
be or not to be a poet. But it can only be inadvertence on Mr.
Mackail's part that would deny that the boy Milton at that age, though
not a great poet, was already himself and, more than that, was already
promising what he was soon to perform. Who, looking back from the
_Ode_ and _Comus_ and _Paradise Lost_, does not hear some preluding of
the authentic strain of Milton in

"Who by his all-commanding might
Did fill the new-made world with light"?

{96} Is it fanciful to note that we have here, no doubt in their barest
primitive form, two of Milton's life-long themes? The Authorized
Version speaks of "him that made great lights": how Miltonically
transformed those words already are in the two quoted lines! De
Quincey said that Milton was "not an author amongst authors, not a poet
amongst poets, but a power amongst powers." However that may be, it is
certain that he, so occupied all his life with thinking and writing
ab