ide his verses.
The shadowy mistresses who emulated the glories of Beatrice and Laura
were even less substantial than they; and, though that could {132} not
hinder great poets from making fine poetry out of them, it was fatal to
the ordinary sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of overblown
and insincere verbiage. From all this Milton emancipated it and, as
Landor said, "gave the notes to glory." To glory and to other things;
for not all his sonnets are consecrated to glory. They deal with
various subjects; but each, whether its topic be his blindness, the
death of his wife, or the fame of Fairfax or Cromwell, is the product
of a personal experience of his own. No one can read them through
without feeling that he gets from them a true knowledge of the man. At
their weakest, as in that _To a Lady_, they convey, in the words of
Mark Pattison, "the sense that here is a true utterance of a great
soul." The rather commonplace thought and language somehow do not
prevent the total effect from being impressive. He entirely fails only
when he goes below the level of poetry altogether and repeats in verse
the angry scurrility of his divorce pamphlets. And even there some
remnant of his artist's sense of the self-restraint of verse preserves
him from the worst degradations of his prose. For the rest, they give
us his musical and scholarly tastes, his temperate pleasures and his
love of that sort of company which Shelley {133} confessed to
preferring, "such society as is quiet, wise and good"; they give us the
high ideal with which he became a poet, the high patriotism that drew
him into politics, and that sense, both for himself and for others, of
life as a thing to be lived in the presence and service of God which
was the eternally true part of his religion. The four finest are those
on the Massacre in Piedmont, On his Blindness, On attaining the age of
twenty-three, and that addressed to Cromwell, which perhaps has the
finest touch of all in the pause which comes with such tremendous
effect after "And Worcester's laureate wreath." But that to the memory
of his wife and "Captain or Colonel or Knight in Arms," the one
addressed to Lawrence and the first of those addressed to Skinner, come
very near the best; and the whole eight would be included by any good
judge in a collection of the fifty best English sonnets, to which
Milton would make a larger contribution than any one except, perhaps,
Wordsworth and Shakspea