n from mountain-tops the dusky clouds
Ascending, while the North-wind sleeps, o'erspread
Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element
Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow or shower,
If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
Extend his evening beam, the fields revive,
The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds
Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings."

Note how large and general it is. Its method is the classical appeal
to universal knowledge and feeling, not the romantic method of
strangeness of sentiment and detailed particularity of truth. Matthew
Arnold once recommended those who cannot read Greek or Latin to read
Milton as a far better key than any translation can be to the secret of
the greatness of the ancient poets. This is the truth: and not only
for the reason on which Arnold laid just stress--the "sure and flawless
perfection of rhythm and diction" in which, as he truly says, Milton is
unique among English poets: but also for his classical habit of mind,
for his central sanity, for the sureness with which he makes his call
on the thoughts and emotions, not of eccentric {165} or exceptional
individuals, but of the men and women of all times and all nations.

Yet he can use his similes, as we said, to introduce the life of his
own day and still generally carry his classical manner with him. So in
the following simile he begins with the Homeric wolf and ends with the
Roman and Laudian clergy. Satan has leapt over the wall of Paradise:
and the simile begins--

"As when a prowling wolf,
Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve
In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,
Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold:
Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash
Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors,
Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,
In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles:
So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold:
So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb."

The last line smacks perhaps more of the angry pamphleteer than fits
with classical sanity: but how admirably the London citizen's house
gives vivid reality to the beautiful remoteness of the wolf which
English shepherds had long forgotten to fear; how the recollection,
present to every reader's {166} mind, of that very same simile in the
Gospel of St. John, prepares the way for its religious application
here: