tain of peace in the thought of God's will, and the faith that he
was daily advancing nearer to the light of heaven and the divine
presence. Milton, a sincere believer in God {13} if man ever were,
must also at times have had his moments of beatific vision in which the
invisible peace of God became more real than the storms of earthly life
and the vileness of men. Indeed, we see the traces of such moments in
the opening of _Comus_, in the concluding lines of _Lycidas_, in the
sustained ecstasy of _At a Solemn Music_. But they appear to have been
only moments. Milton was a lifelong Crusader who scarcely set foot in
the Holy Land. The will of God meant for him not so much peace as war.
He is a prophet rather than a psalmist. "Woe is me, my Mother, that
thou hast born me a man of strife and contention," he himself complains
in the _Reason of Church Government_. He was not much over thirty when
he wrote those words: and they remained true of him to the end. For
twenty years the strife was active and public; ever, in appearance at
least, more and more successful: then for the final fourteen it became
the impotent wrath of a caged and wounded lion. Never for a moment did
his soul bow to the triumph of the idolaters: but neither could it
forget them, nor make any permanent escape into purer air. _Paradise
Lost_, _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_, especially the last, are all
plainly the works of a man conscious of {14} having been defeated by a
world which he could defy but could not forget. Sublimely certain of
the righteousness of his cause, he has no abiding certainty of its
victory. He hears too plainly the insulting voices of the sons of
Belial, and broods in proud and angry gloom over the ruin of all his
hopes, personal, political and ecclesiastical. And as his religion was
a thing of intellect and conscience, not a thing of spiritual vision,
he cannot make for himself that mystical trans-valuation of all earthly
doings in the light of which the struggles of political and
ecclesiastical parties are seen as things temporary, trivial and of
little account.

Such are the limitations of Milton. They are those of a man who lived
in the time of a great national struggle, deliberately chose his own
side in it, and from thenceforth saw nothing in the other but folly,
obstinacy and crime. He has in him nothing whatever of the universal,
and universally sympathetic, insight of Shakspeare. And he has paid
the price o