alone
could have enabled him to attain it. He is looked upon as a great, good,
reverend, austere, not very amiable, and not very sensitive man. The
author and the book are thus set at variance, and the attempt to
conceive the character as a whole results in confusion and
inconsistency. To us, on the contrary, Milton, with all his strength of
will and regularity of life, seems as perfect a representative as any of
his compeers of the sensitiveness and impulsive passion of the poetical
temperament. We appeal to his remarkable dependence upon external
prompting for his compositions; to the rapidity of his work under
excitement, and his long intervals of unproductiveness; to the heat and
fury of his polemics; to the simplicity with which, fortunately for us,
he inscribes small particulars of his own life side by side with
weightiest utterances on Church and State; to the amazing precipitancy
of his marriage and its rupture; to his sudden pliability upon appeal to
his generosity; to his romantic self-sacrifice when his country demanded
his eyes from him; above all, to his splendid ideals of regenerated
human life, such as poets alone either conceive or realize. To overlook
all this is to affirm that Milton wrote great poetry without being truly
a poet. One more remark may be added, though not required by thinking
readers. We must beware of confounding the essential with the accidental
Milton--the pure vital spirit with the casual vesture of the creeds and
circumstances of the era in which it became clothed with mortality:--

"They are still immortal
Who, through birth's orient portal
And death's dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight
In the brief dust and light
Gathered around their chariots as they go.
New shapes they still may weave,
New gods, new laws, receive."

If we knew for certain which of the many causes that have enlisted noble
minds in our age would array Milton's spirit "in brief dust and light,"
supposing it returned to earth in this nineteenth century, we should
know which was the noblest of them all, but we should be as far as ever
from knowing a final and stereotyped Milton.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: A famous Presbyterian tract of the day, so called from the
combined initials of the authors, one of whom was Milton's old
instructor, Thomas Young. The "Remonstrant" to whom Milton replied was
Bis