ef beauties of the poem--

"Ay me! I fondly dream!
'Had ye been there,' for what could that have done?"

And so to the vanity of earthly fame and the thought of another fame
which is not vanity. Twice he seems to be going to escape out of the
world of pastoral, as he strikes his own trumpet note of confident
{130} faith and stern judgment; twice the unfailing instinct of art
calls him back and makes a beauty of what might have been a mere
incongruity--

"Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams: return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues."

The flowers come, in their amazing beauty, as poetry knows and names
them, not altogether after the order of nature; till the fine flight is
once more recalled to earth in that second return to the sad reality of
things which provides the most beautiful, and as the manuscript shows,
one of the most carefully elaborated passages in the whole--

"Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so, to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
{131}
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world."

The least critical reader, when he is told that the daffodil and
amaranthus lines were once in the reverse order, that the "frail
thoughts" were at first "sad," and the "shores" "floods," and above all
that the "whelming tide" was once a thing so insignificant as the
"humming tide," can judge for himself by what a succession of
inspirations a work of consummate art is produced.

There remain the sonnets, whose sufficient praise is given in an
immortal line of Wordsworth, while all that a fine critic had thought
or learnt about them is contained in the scholarly edition of Mark
Pattison. Technically they are remarkable, like everything else of
Milton's, at once for their conservatism and their originality; while
their content has all his characteristic sincerity. They occupy a most
important place in the history of the English sonnet, which had so far
been almost entirely given up to a single theme, that of the poet's
unhappy love, which had commonly little existence outs