An Introduction to the Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton / Comprising All the Autobiographic Passages in His Works, the More Explicit Presentations of His Ideas of True Liberty.

by John Milton

'But knowledge is as food, and needs no less

Her temperance over appetite, to know

In measure what the mind may well contain;

Oppresses else with surfeit, and soon turns

Wisdom to folly, as nourishment to wind.'

Wordsworth had as firm an assurance as Milton had, that he was a dedicated spirit; but he did not attach the importance which Milton did to great acquisitions of knowledge as a means to the fulfilment of his mission. But Wordsworth's sense of his mission as a poet called for an expression of his soul-experiences in occasional poems. The composition of a great epic would have shut him off from expressing, day by day, the relations of Nature to the soul, as those relations were revealed to him—relations with which wide learning had comparatively little to do.

Milton was constitutionally, as well as by his education and associations, a Puritan. And the state of the times in which he lived coöperated with his mental and moral constitution, and with his education, to make the conflict of Good and Evil, the great fact, for him, of the world, and, indeed, of the Universe. To picture in the most impressive way possible this great fact, and the sure triumph of Good over Evil, however long that triumph may be retarded, he early felt to be his mission as a poet. And he looked upon the acquisition of great stores of learning as part of the indispensable equipment for one, who, in this conflict, would range himself on the side of Good. All history and all literatures, all sciences, religions, mythologies, were to be explored, and made subservient, as far as might be, by him who would fight the good fight. The accumulated knowledge and wisdom of mankind was for him a part of that panoply of God

which St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Ephesians (vi. 11), commands to put on, in order to 'be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.'

But learning was but a part, and however indispensable, an inferior part, of this panoply. The soul's essential self, as the medium of the divine, must give the prime efficacy to whatever is done in the mighty conflict of good with evil. In the words of Browning's 'Sordello,' 'a poet must be earth's essential king,' and he is that by virtue of his exerting, or shedding the influence of, his essential personality in his poetical creations. In his 'Apology for Smectymnuus,' he says, 'And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy.'

And in his 'Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty,' he speaks of the great work which looms hazily up in the future, as one 'not to be obtained by the invocation of dame memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases: to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs;' etc. In his invocation of the Holy Spirit, in the opening of the 'Paradise Lost,' he says: