"Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest";
will touch on the romance of old towers and poetic memories of which they have only dimly heard, and look back at Thyrsis and Corydon and all the pastoral poetry which such scenes recall to the scholar's memory. The next section of the poem is taken from a different world, that of the merry England of the Middle Age with its ale and dances and Faery Mab; while the final one carries us quite away from the rustics to the town and the town's pleasures, pageantry and drama and music—this last, as always, moving the poet to peculiar rapture, and an answering music of verse—
"The melting voice through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony."
{110}
Il Penseroso is the praise of Melancholy as L'Allegro of Mirth. But Milton was not a melancholy man in our sense of the word. When Keats declares that—
"in the very temple of Delight Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,"
he is interpreting a mood into which Milton could not even in imagination enter, that of the intellectual sensualist who dreams his life away and cannot act. Milton was a man of action and character, and his Melancholy, quite unlike this, is that of the Spirit in his own Comus, who "began—
"Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy,
To meditate my rural minstrelsy."
He hails her at once as a "Goddess sage and holy" and as a "Nun devout and pure"; and it is evident from the first that her sorrows, so far as she is sorrowful, are those of aspiring spirit, not those of self-indulging and disappointed flesh. Her life of quiet studies and pleasures is self-chosen; there is a note of will and self-control in the words in which the poet bids her call about her Peace and Quiet and Spare Fast, Retired Leisure and Contemplation and Silence; and the descriptions which follow of his walks {111} and studies and pleasures, in town and country, by night and morning, are those of a man who has deliberately shaped his life, and means so to live it that he shall leave it without regret or shame and with the hope of passing from it to a better.
Nor is it any mood of mere melancholy that has given us in this poem such pleasant glimpses of his walks abroad and studies at home in these Horton years. He pays his tribute to Plato, the Greek tragedians and the dramatists of Elizabethan and Jacobean England; and to his own two most famous predecessors, Chaucer and Spenser; and we think of the scholarly hours spent gravely and quietly but far from unhappily. More delightful still, with more beauty and more happiness in them, are the poem's well-known landscapes—