gro ladies in white muslin gowns,"

and Milton's--

"Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed;"

between which yawns an obviously impassable gulf.

Milton is sometimes harsh, crabbed, grim in expression as in thought:
but these things are not at all necessarily fatal to poetry as is the
cool and contented obviousness of Wordsworth's weak moments. Milton is
occasionally contented in his own lofty fashion, but he is never cool,
and never less so than in _Samson_. All through it he is face to face
with a tremendous issue in which he himself is supremely interested: he
is "enacting hell," to use Goethe's curious phrase, which fits Milton
so much better than it fits the serenity of Homer. Twenty years before
he had written, in quite another connection, "No man knows hell like
him who converses most in heaven": and now in his old age he embodies
that tremendous truth in his last poem. All his poems are intensely
emotional and personal: but none so much so as _Samson Agonistes_,
where he is fixing all eyes on the {231} tragedy of his own life. The
parallel between Samson and Milton does not extend, of course, to all
the details. But even of them many correspond, such as the blindness,
the disastrous marriage with "the daughter of an infidel," the old age
of a broken and defeated champion of God become a gazing-stock to
triumphant profanity. But more than any special circumstance it is the
whole general position of Samson as a man dedicated from his birth to
the service of God, and gladly accepting the dedication, yet failing in
his task and apparently deserted by his God, which makes of him a type
in which Milton can see himself and the Cromwellian saints who lie
ground under the heels of the victorious Philistines of the
Restoration. To him as to Samson the situation is one that makes
questionings on the dark and doubtful ways of God unavoidable: darker
to him even than to Samson: for he has no guilty memory of a supreme
act of folly to explain the divine desertion.

The action of the drama is extremely simple. Samson is found enjoying
a brief respite from his punishment. The day is a feast of Dagon, and
the Philistine "superstition" allows no work to be done on it.
Accordingly an attendant who is a mute person is leading {232} him to a
bank where he is accustomed to take what rest he is allowed and enjoy

"The breath of heaven fresh blowing, pure and sweet
With day-spring born;"

that sensation o