out God, thought of God habitually as a power. For him God is
Creator, Sovereign, Judge, much more often than Father: we hear from
Milton more of his might than of his love. So at once here, at the age
of fifteen, he inserts into the Psalm he is paraphrasing that
characteristic phrase, so splendid and potent itself, so gladly
speaking of potency and splendour,

"Who by his all-commanding might."

And, if power be one of the most frequent elements in the Miltonic
thought, what is more frequent than light in the Miltonic vision? And
is not that substitution of "did fill the new-made world with light"
for the bare scientific statement of the original, a foretaste of the
Milton who, all his life, blind or seeing, felt {97} the joy and wonder
of light as no other man ever did? Do we not rightly hear in it a note
that will soon be enriched into the "Light unsufferable" of the _Ode_,
the "endless morn of Light" of the _Solemn Music_, the "bosom bright of
blazing Majesty and Light" of the _Epitaph on Lady Winchester_, and,
not to multiply quotations, of the "Hail, holy Light" which opens the
great invocation of the third book of _Paradise Lost_?

It may be as well, before discussing the _Ode_ and the other contents
of the volume issued in 1645, to mention another poem which is of
earlier date than the _Ode_, though it was not printed till 1673: the
beautiful Spenserian lines _On the Death of a Fair Infant_. They
afford the most real of the exceptions to the rule that Milton is
always from the beginning to the end unmistakably and solely himself.
In this poem he shows himself at the age of seventeen so soaked in
Spenser and Spenser's school that, when his baby niece dies and he sets
himself to make her an elegy, what he gives us is these graceful verses
conveying as much as a boy of seventeen can catch of the lovely elegiac
note of Spenser.

"O noble Spirit: live there ever blessed
The world's late wonder, and the heaven's new joy;
{98}
Live ever there, and leave me here distressed
With mortal cares and cumbrous world's annoy."

So sings Spenser of Sidney: and, though Milton is scarcely yet more the
equal of Spenser than his baby niece was of Sidney, it is a beautiful
echo of his master that he gives us in his

"O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,"

and in

"Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead,
Or that thy corse corrupts in earth's dark wom