working out his intricately beautiful theme; or is it
nearer the impression we get to say that we watch the skilful dancer
executing his elaborate figure? In either case we await with sure
confidence the triumphant close. The final couplet, by the way, and
particularly the great Alexandrine, is a curious anticipation of
Dryden's finest manner. But the rest is a music Dryden's ear never
heard. No wonder Comus cries--

"Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?
Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
And with these raptures moves the vocal air
To testify his hidden residence.
{118}
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled!"

The last lines show that Milton has not yet outgrown the Jacobean taste
for conceits. So a little later on we find him writing that--

"Silence
Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
Deny her nature, and be never more
Still to be so displaced";

a piece of intellectual trickery such as Shakspeare too often played
with, and Donne laboured at; and one of a special interest because we
see it again later transformed and purified in the famous passage of
_Paradise Lost_, in which "Silence was pleased" not only with the
stillness of evening, but also with the song of the bird whose "amorous
descant" alone interrupts it. Yet even that seemed to Warton, the best
of Milton's early critics, a conceit unworthy of the poet. So
difficult it is for "rational" criticism to see the distinction between
an intellectual extravagance and a flight of the imagination.

There are other things in _Comus_ beside conceits which recall
Shakspeare. What can {119} be more exactly in his freshest youngest
manner than such a line as--

"Love-darting eyes and tresses like the morn"?

And what can be closer to the note of the great Histories and Tragedies
than the Elder Brother's outburst of faith--

"If this fail,
The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble"?

I see no reason whatever to doubt, in spite of what has lately been
said by a modern critic and poet, that these speeches of the Brothers
and the Lady, rather than those of Comus, represent Milton's own
conception of life. It is true, of course, that _Comus_ was one of
several masks performed as an aristocratic cou