of Christ's." At Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a
country seat, he passed five years more, perfecting himself in his
studies, and then traveled for fifteen months, {151} mainly in Italy,
visiting Naples and Rome, but residing at Florence. Here he saw
Galileo, a prisoner of the Inquisition "for thinking otherwise in
astronomy than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers thought." Milton
is the most scholarly and the most truly classical of English poets.
His Latin verse, for elegance and correctness, ranks with Addison's;
and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But
his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fine and
chastened result, and not in laborious allusion and pedantic citation,
as too often in Ben Jonson, for instance. "My father," he wrote,
"destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane
letters." He was also destined for the ministry, but, "coming to some
maturity of years and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the
Church, . . . I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence, before
the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and
forswearing." Other hands than a bishop's were laid upon his head.
"He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter," he
says, "ought himself to be a true poem." And he adds that his "natural
haughtiness" saved him from all impurity of living. Milton had a
sublime self-respect. The dignity and earnestness of the Puritan
gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the Renaissance.
Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his gift to the
service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant soldier in the
war for {152} liberation. He was the poet of a cause, and his song was
keyed to

"The Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised
To heighth of noblest temper, heroes old
Arming to battle."

On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and
receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in
intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English
poetry, the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.
Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than
dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it.

Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge, the most important was his
splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Ho