out loss. It is obvious that a
poet whose natural range is so great can hardly be fully himself in the
sonnet. But Wordsworth had little of this spacious freedom of poetic
energy; to him--

"'twas pastime to be bound
Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground."

And so he could use it for everything; for great events and also for
very small; not {138} exhausting great or small, but finding in each,
whatever it might be, some single aspect or quality which he could
touch to new power by that meditative tenderness of his to which Milton
was, to his great loss, an entire stranger. The natural mysticism, for
instance, of such sonnets as, "It is a beauteous evening, calm and
free," or, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," is quite out of
Milton's reach. In this and other ways Wordsworth could do much more
with the sonnet than Milton could. But without Milton some of his very
greatest things would scarcely have been attempted. All the sonnets
that utter his magnanimous patriotism, his dauntless passion for
English liberty, his burning sympathy with the oppressed, the "holy
glee" of his hatred of tyranny, are of the right lineage of Milton
himself. One can almost hear Milton crying--

"It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which to the open sea
Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
Hath flowed 'with pomp of waters unwithstood,'
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the checks of salutary bands,
That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever."

{139} There and in the "Two Voices" and in the "Inland within a Hollow
Vale" and in the Toussaint l'Ouverture sonnet, and others, we cannot
fail to catch an echo of the poet who first "gave the sonnet's notes to
glory." No one can count up all the things which have united in the
making of any poem, but among those which made these sonnets possible
must certainly be reckoned the Fairfax and Cromwell sonnets, and above
all the still more famous one on the Massacre in Piedmont. The forces
which animated England to defy and defeat Napoleon were only partly
moral; but so far as they were that they found perfect expression
through only one voice, that of Wordsworth. And there is no doubt as
to where he caught the note which he struck again to such high purpose.
He has told us himself--

"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour;
Engla