But with the Ode the age of imitation is over for Milton and he stands forward at once {99} as himself. The soft graces, somewhat lacking in outline, of the Fair Infant, are forgotten in the sonorous strength of the Ode. The half-hesitating whisper has become a strain of mighty music; the uncertain hand has gained self-confidence so that the design now shows the boldness and decision of a master. At once, in the second stanza, he is away to heaven, with a curious anticipation of what was to occupy him so much thirty years later—
"That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heaven's high council-table
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and, here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay."
Milton's genius was universal, in the strict sense of the word, that is, living in or occupied with the universe. He is as supramundane in his way as Shelley in his. And no part of the universe was more real to him than heaven, the abode of God and angels and spirits, the original and ultimate home of his beloved music and light. It is noticeable that there is hardly a single poem of his—L'Allegro and Samson are the only important ones—in {100} which he does not at one point or other make his escape to heaven. In most of them, as all through this Ode and the Solemn Music, in the conclusions of Lycidas and Il Penseroso, in the opening of Comus, this heavenly flight provides passages of exceptional and peculiarly Miltonic beauty. The fact is that, though little of a mystic, he was from the first entirely of that temper, intellectually descended from Plato, morally from Stoicism and Christianity but more from Stoicism, which cannot be content to be "confined and pestered in this pinfold here," disdains the "low-thoughted cares" of mere bodily and temporal life, and habitually aspires to live the life of the mind and the spirit,
"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call Earth."
So here at once, in his first important poem, what in other hands might have been a mere telling of the old human and earthly story of the first Christmas night becomes in Milton's a vision of all time and all space, with heaven in it, and the stars, and the music of the spheres, and the great timeless scheme of redemption with which he was to have so much to do later, with history, too, and literature, the false gods of the Old Testament and of the Greek and Roman classics already {101} anticipating the parts they were to play in Paradise Lost.
And note one other thing. Milton is only twenty-one, but he is already an incomparable artist. The stanza had been so far the usual form for lyrics, and he adopts it here for the first and last time. But if he accepts the instrument prescribed by tradition, with what a master's hand this wonderful boy of twenty-one touches it, and to what astonishing music! It seems that the stanza itself is his own. Every one has felt the combination in it, as he manages it, of the romantic movement and suggestion which he loved and renounced with the classical strength which is the chief element in the final impression he made on English poetry. As yet the romantic quality is the stronger, and even one of the mighty closing Alexandrines is dedicated to the lovely Elizabethan fancy of the "yellow skirted fayes" who
"Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze."
How such a line as that, or still more plainly the two which end the most romantic stanza of all—
"No nightly trance, or breathèd spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell" {102} found a rejoicing echo in Keats is obvious. This, of course, has often been noticed. But has it ever been remarked that there are also lines in the poem which might have been written by another nineteenth-century poet of equal but very different genius?
"The winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kissed,
Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean;"—