Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

Gorgeous Tragedy

In sceptered pall come sweeping by,

or calls up the great bards who have sung

Of forests and enchantments drear

Where more is meant than meets the ear.

Milton seems to produce his effects by exciting or dilating our own imaginations; and this excitement accomplished, he is satisfied. Shakspeare, on the other hand, seldom leaves any work to be done by the imagination of his readers; and after we have enjoyed the total effect of a passage, we may always study the particulars with advantage. Shakspeare never attaches any particular value to his thoughts, or images, or phrases, but scatters them with a royal carelessness. Milton seems always to respect his; he lays out broad avenues for the triumphal processions of his verse; covers the ground with tapestry inwoven with figures of mythology and romance; builds up arches rich with historic carvings for them to march under, and accompanies them with swells and cadences of inspiring music. “Paradise Lost” is full of what may be called vistas of verse. Notice, for example, how far off he begins when he is about to speak of himself—as at the beginning of the third book and of the seventh. When you read “Paradise Lost” the feeling you have is one of vastness. You float under a great sky brimmed with sunshine, or hung with constellations; the abyss of space is around you; thunders mutter on the horizon; you hear the mysterious sigh of an unseen ocean; and if the scene changes, it is with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. Of all books it seems most purely the work of a disembodied mind. Of all poets he could most easily afford to be blind; of all, his poetry owes least to the senses, except that of hearing; everything, except his music, came to him through a mental medium, and perhaps even that may have been intellectual—as in Beethoven, who composed behind the veil of deafness.

Milton is a remarkable instance of a great imaginative faculty fed by books instead of Nature. One has only to read the notes of the commentators upon his poems to see how perfectly he made whatever he took his own. Everything that he touches swells and towers into vastness. It is wonderful to see how, from the most withered and juiceless hint that he met in his reading, his grand images “rise like an exhalation”; how from the most hopeless-looking leaden box that he found in that huge drag-net with which he gathered everything from the waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius to do his bidding.

That proud consciousness of his own strength, and confidence at the same time that he is the messenger of the Most High, never forsake him. It is they which give him his grand manner, and make him speak as if with the voice of a continent. He reverenced always the sacredness of his own calling and character. As poet, full of the lore of antiquity, and, as prophet, charged to vindicate the ways of God, it seems to me that I see the majestic old man laying one hand upon the shoulder of the Past, and the other upon that of the Future, and so standing sublimely erect above that abject age to pour his voice along the centuries. We are reminded of what is told of Firdusi, whose father on the night he was born dreamed he saw him standing in the middle of the earth and singing so loud and clear that he was heard in all four quarters of the heavens at once.

I feel how utterly inadequate any single lecture must be on such a theme, and how impossible it is to say anything about Milton in an hour. I have merely touched upon three or four points that seemed to me most characteristic of his style, for our concern with him is solely as a poet. Yet it would be an unpardonable reticence if I did not say, before I close, how profoundly we ought to reverence the grandeur of the man, his incorruptible love of freedom, his scholarly and unvulgar republicanism, his scorn of contemporary success, his faith in the future and in God, his noble frugality of life.

The noise of those old warfares is hushed; the song of Cavalier and the fierce psalm of the Puritan are silent now; the hands of his episcopal adversaries no longer hold pen or crozier—they and their works are dust; but he who loved truth more than life, who was faithful to the other world while he did his work in this; his seat is in that great cathedral whose far-echoing aisles are the ages whispering with blessed feet of the Saints, Martyrs, and Confessors of every clime and creed; whose bells sound only centurial hours; about whose spire crowned with the constellation of the cross no meaner birds than missioned angels hover; whose organ music is the various stops of endless changes breathed through by endless good; whose choristers are the elect spirits of all time, that sing, serene and shining as morning stars, the ever-renewed mystery of Creative Power.