fought for a great cause and been utterly defeated must often be
full of the hopeless half-resigned and half-rebellious broodings in
which throughout _Samson_ we hear so plainly the voice of Milton
himself.

"God of our fathers! what is Man,
That thou towards him with hand so various--
Or might I say contrarious?--
Temper'st thy providence through his short course;
Not evenly, as thou rulest
The angelic orders and inferior creatures mute,
Irrational and brute?
Nor do I name of men the common rout,
That wandering loose about
Grow up and perish as the summer fly,
Heads without name, no more remembered;
But such as thou hast solemnly elected,
With gifts and graces eminently adorned,
To some great work, thy glory,
And people's safety, which in part they effect:
Yet toward these thus dignified thou oft,
Amidst their highth of noon,
Changest thy countenance and thy hand, with no regard
Of highest favours past
From thee on them, or them to thee of service."

{221} This is Milton undisguised speaking of and for himself. And so
is the still sadder outburst in the very first speech of Samson--

"O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first-created beam, and thou great Word,
'Let there be light, and light was over all';
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
The Sun to me is dark
And silent as the Moon
When she deserts the night,
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
That light is in the soul,
She all in every part, why was the sight
To such a tender ball as the eye confined,
So obvious and so easy to be quenched,
And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused,
That she might look at will through every pore?
Then had I not been thus exiled from light,
As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried; but, O yet more miserable!
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave;
Buried, yet not exempt,
By privilege of death and burial,
From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs,
But made hereby obnoxious more
{222}
To all the miseries of life,
Life in captivity
Among inhuman foes."

This sublime music in which the soul's emotion finds and obeys its own
law was scarcely audible to the age which followed Milton's death, when
poets had