{104} This was written some years later; and even after Paradise Lost it may rank as the most daring and entirely successful of Milton's long-sustained wheelings of musical flight. The stanza no longer provides him with space enough: and here his whole twenty-eight lines are one continuous strain, with no break in them and scarcely any pause, in ten-syllabled lines of boldly varied rhyme and accent. His task here is not so difficult as it was to be in Paradise Lost, for he has rhyme to provide him with variety and he admits two verses of six syllables among his twenty-eight; but already he is completely master of the possibilities of the ten-syllable line, and can make it yield as lavish a wealth of variety in unity as was later on to make the great passages of Paradise Lost an eternal amazement to lovers and practisers of the art of verse.
"Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ,
Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
And to our high-raised phantasy present
That undisturbèd song of pure concent."
They are all the same line, and yet how different. It is difficult to believe that this is the same metre which Waller and Dryden {105} were soon, amid universal applause, to file down into the smooth monotony of—
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?"
For Dryden, as still more for Pope and the school of Pope, the thing to accomplish, so far as possible, is to prevent any of the natural accents falling upon the third, fifth or other odd syllables; there is, for instance, not one which does so in the first fifty lines of Absalom and Achitophel or of the Epistle to Arbuthnot. The object of Milton, on the contrary, is to vary the position of his accents to the utmost possible extent compatible with the preservation of the verse. In these four lines his first accent falls on the first syllable in the first two, probably on the fourth in the third, and on the second in the last. And the other accents are similarly varied in place and, it may be added, in number. In Milton's case the listener's wonder is at the number and intricacy of the variations he can play upon the theme of his verse; in Pope's it is at the amazing cleverness with which it can be exactly repeated in {106} different words. Milton's music, too, is continuous, not broken into couplets sharply divided from each other. His verses pass into each other as wave melts into wave on the sea-shore; there is a constant breaking on the beach, but which will break and which will glide imperceptibly into its successor we cannot guess though we sit watching for an hour; the sameness of rise and fall, crash and silence, is unbroken, yet no one wave is exactly like its predecessor, no two successive minutes give either eye or ear exactly the same experience. So with Milton's verse; even the ocean of Paradise Lost has few or no waves of music of more varied unity, of more continuous variety than such lines as—
"As once we did, till disproportioned sin
Jarred against Nature's chime and with harsh din
Broke the fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed
In perfect diapason whilst they stood
In first obedience and their state of good."
The chief remaining minor poems of Milton are the Allegro and Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas and the Sonnets. The two first are written {107} in those rhymed eight-syllable lines which he had already used in part of his Song on May Morning. Like that beautiful little poem, they represent him in his simplest mood, the mood of the quiet years at Horton, spent, more than any other part of his life, in the open air, and among plain folk unlettered and unpolitical. It is natural enough, therefore, that they are the most popular as they are the easiest of all his poems. Their two titles, which mean The Cheerful Man and The Thoughtful or Meditative Man, point to the two moods from which they regard life. Both moods are, of course, described as they might actually be experienced by a highly cultivated and serious man like Milton himself. The gravity is the gravity of a man of thought, not of a man of affairs; the pleasures are those of a scholar and a poet, not those of a trifler, a sportsman, or a sensualist. Like all Milton's works they borrow freely from earlier poets, remain entirely original and Miltonic, and are imitated only at the peril of the imitator. Any one who looks at the parallel passages in Marlowe and Fletcher will see how very like they are and how very little the likeness matters. The poems stand alone; there is nothing of quite the same kind in English. {108} The least unlike pair of poems is perhaps the two Spring Odes of the present Poet Laureate, than whom no one has owed more to Milton or repaid the debt with more verse which Milton would have been glad to inspire. But Mr. Bridges has, of course, avoided anything approaching a direct imitation; he has merely used the hint of two contrasted poems on one subject, touching inevitably, as Milton had touched, upon some of the opposite pleasures of town and country, and bringing Milton's mood of cheerful gravity to bear upon them both.
It is unnecessary to discuss in detail poems so well known. But a few words may be said. Milton was never again to be so genial as he is here. Never again does he place himself so sympathetically close to the daily tasks and pleasures of ordinary unimportant men and women. After characteristically choosing the West Wind and the Dawn as likelier parents of true mirth than any god of wine or sensual pleasure, he will go on for once to call for the company of—
"Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides";
he will cast a pleased eye on the birds and flowers and the sunrise—the latter moving {109} him to the characteristic magnificence which in this poem he has elsewhere forgone; he will recognize, with the gratefulness of the tired student, the careless gladness in the voices of ploughman and milkmaid, as he passes them in his early morning walk. Then he will give a glance to beauty which such as they cannot see, or cannot be fully conscious of seeing—