Very different in spirit from anything hitherto given is that burst of Shelley’s in his “Adonais,” allusive to Milton. It is curious how Shelley, in his unchastised youth of eager beating against the bars of convention and law, found his sympathy with Milton as much in ideas political as in ideas poetical:
He died
Who was the sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old, and lonely, when his country’s pride—
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide.
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,
Into the gulf of death; but his clear sprite
Yet reigns o’er earth; the third among the sons of light.
It is the triumph of Milton as poet that he keeps his empire undisputed over minds that kicked with utmost energy against those religious sentiments which not only Milton the man held dearest, but which Milton the poet insisted on making of the very fabric of his verse. Byron, too, and this amidst the ribald freedom of his “Don Juan”—amidst the freedom of it, and with the freedom of it—says of Milton: