[Section VI.—Milton as a Poet]
"Milton has acknowledged to me," writes Dryden, "that Spenser was his original." In fact, by the purity and elevation of their morals, by the fulness and connection of their style, by the noble chivalric sentiments, and their fine classical arrangement, they are brothers. But Milton had yet other masters—Beaumont, Fletcher, Burton, Drummond, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, the whole splendid English Renaissance, and behind it the Italian poesy, Latin antiquity, the fine Greek literature, and all the sources whence the English Renaissance sprang. He continued the great current, but in a manner of his own. He took their mythology, their allegories, sometimes their conceits,[157] and discovered anew their rich coloring, their magnificent sentiment of living nature, their inexhaustible admiration of forms and colors. But, at the same time, he transformed their diction, and employed poetry in a new service. He wrote, not by impulse, and at the mere contact with things, but like a man of letters, a classic, in a scholarlike manner, with the assistance of books, seeing objects as much through previous writings as in themselves, adding to his images the images of others, borrowing and recasting their inventions, as an artist who unites and multiplies the bosses and driven gold, already entwined on a diadem by twenty workmen. He made thus for himself a composite and brilliant style, less natural than that of his precursors, less fit for effusions, less akin to the lively first glow of sensation, but more solid, more regular, more capable of concentrating in one large patch of light all their sparkle and splendor. He brings together like Æschylus, words of "six cubits," plumed and decked in purple, and makes them pass like a royal train before his idea to exalt and announce it. He introduces to us
"The breathing roses of the wood,
Fair silver-buskin'd nymphs;"[158]
And tells how
"The gray-hooded Even,
Like a sad votarist in palmer's weed.
Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phoebus' wain;"[159]
And speaks of
"All the sea-girt isles,
That, like to rich and various gems, inlay
The unadorned bosom of the deep;"[160]
And
"That undisturbed song of pure concent,
Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne,
To Him that sits thereon,
With saintly shout, and solemn jubilee;
Where the bright Seraphim, in burning row,
Their loud-uplifted angel-trumpets blow."[161]
He gathered into full nosegays the flowers scattered through the other poets: