blade in lightnings about his head. Compared with Herbert,
Milton was a man in health. He never _shows_, at least, any diseased
regard of himself. His eye is fixed on the truth, and he knows of no
ill-faring. While a man looks thitherward, all the movements of his
spirit reveal themselves only in peace.

Everything conspired, or, should I not rather say? everything was freely
given, to make Milton a great poet. Leaving the original seed of melody,
the primordial song in the soul which all his life was an effort to
utter, let us regard for a moment the circumstances that favoured its
development.

[Illustration:

His volant touch
Fied and pursued transverse the resonant fugue.]

From childhood he had listened to the sounds of the organ; doubtless
himself often gave breath to the soundboard with his hands on the lever
of the bellows, while his father's

volant touch,
Instinct through all proportions low and high,
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue;

and the father's organ-harmony we yet hear in the son's verse as in none
but his. Those organ-sounds he has taken for the very breath of his
speech, and articulated them. He had education and leisure, freedom to
think, to travel, to observe: he was more than thirty before he had to
earn a mouthful of bread by his own labour. Rushing at length into
freedom's battle, he stood in its storm with his hand on the wheel of the
nation's rudder, shouting many a bold word for God and the Truth, until,
fulfilled of experience as of knowledge, God set up before him a canvas
of utter darkness: he had to fill it with creatures of radiance. God
blinded him with his hand, that, like the nightingale, he might "sing
darkling." Beyond all, his life was pure from his childhood, without
which such poetry as his could never have come to the birth. It is the
pure in heart who shall see God at length; the pure in heart who now hear
his harmonies. More than all yet, he devoted himself from the first to
the will of God, and his prayer that he might write a great poem was
heard.

The unity of his being is the strength of Milton. He is harmony, sweet
and bold, throughout. Not Philip Sidney, not George Herbert loved words
and their melodies more than he; while in their use he is more serious
than either, and harder to please, uttering a music they have rarely
approached. Yet even when speaking with "most miraculous organ," with a
grandeur never heard till then, he overflows