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--

"the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven's wide pathless way."

Perhaps no one again, till Shelley came, felt the vastness, the
pathlessness, of the heaven as Milton did. Or, to come to earth again,
where does poetry set the ear more instantly and actively at the work
of imaginative {112} creation than in those finely suggestive lines
about the curfew--

"Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar"?

And what of that woodland solitude at noon, with memories in it of so
many poets of Greece, Rome, Italy and England, the

"shadows brown, that Sylvan loves,
Of pine, or monumental oak,
Where the rude axe with heaved stroke
Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt
Or fright them from their hallowed haunt,"

which carries us on to perhaps the loveliest lines in all the _Paradise
Lost_--

"In shadier bower,
More sacred and sequestered, though but feigned,
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
Nor Faunus haunted."

There is in the two passages just the difference between the youth and
maturity of genius; but that is all. So _Il Penseroso_ passes on its
delightful way, ending, of course, in music and heaven.

There, too, "before the starry threshold of Jove's court," the next of
these earlier works of Milton, the mask _Comus_, begins. {113} It
strikes its high note at once in what an old lover of literature boldly
called "the finest opening of any theatrical piece ancient or modern."

"Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes
Of bright aerial spirits live insphered
In regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call Earth, and, with low-thoughted care,
Confined and pestered in this pinfold here,
Strive t