ficence
which in this poem he has elsewhere forgone; he will recognize, with
the gratefulness of the tired student, the careless gladness in the
voices of ploughman and milkmaid, as he passes them in his early
morning walk. Then he will give a glance to beauty which such as they
cannot see, or cannot be fully conscious of seeing--

"Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest";

will touch on the romance of old towers and poetic memories of which
they have only dimly heard, and look back at Thyrsis and Corydon and
all the pastoral poetry which such scenes recall to the scholar's
memory. The next section of the poem is taken from a different world,
that of the merry England of the Middle Age with its ale and dances and
Faery Mab; while the final one carries us quite away from the rustics
to the town and the town's pleasures, pageantry and drama and
music--this last, as always, moving the poet to peculiar rapture, and
an answering music of verse--

"The melting voice through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony."

{110}

_Il Penseroso_ is the praise of Melancholy as _L'Allegro_ of Mirth.
But Milton was not a melancholy man in our sense of the word. When
Keats declares that--

"in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,"

he is interpreting a mood into which Milton could not even in
imagination enter, that of the intellectual sensualist who dreams his
life away and cannot act. Milton was a man of action and character,
and his Melancholy, quite unlike this, is that of the Spirit in his own
_Comus_, who "began--

"Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy,
To meditate my rural minstrelsy."

He hails her at once as a "Goddess sage and holy" and as a "Nun devout
and pure"; and it is evident from the first that her sorrows, so far as
she is sorrowful, are those of aspiring spirit, not those of
self-indulging and disappointed flesh. Her life of quiet studies and
pleasures is self-chosen; there is a note of will and self-control in
the words in which the poet bids her call about her Peace and Quiet and
Spare Fast, Retired Leisure and Contemplation and Silence; and the
descriptions which follow of his walks {111} and studies and pleasures,
in town and country, by night and morning, are those of a man who has
deliberately shaped his life, and means so to live it that he shall
leave it without regret