, in which Milton out-distances all previous
English elegy almost as easily as in _Comus_ he had out-distanced all
the earlier masks. It stands with the great passages of _Paradise
Lost_ as the most consummate blending of scholarship and poetry in
Milton and therefore in English. All {124} pastoral poetry is in it,
Theocritus and Virgil, Spenser and Sidney, Drayton and Drummond, with
memories, too, of Ovid and Shakspeare and the Bible; and yet it is pure
and undiluted Milton, with the signet of his peculiar mind and temper
stamped on its every phrase. It was his contribution to a volume of
verses published at Cambridge in 1638 to the memory of Edward King, a
younger contemporary of his at Christ's who was drowned off the Welsh
coast in August 1637. King was already a Fellow of his college, and
one of the most promising young clergymen of his day. Milton had liked
and respected him, no doubt, but had certainly not been so intimate
with him as with young Charles Diodati who died almost exactly a year
later, and was lamented by his great friend in the _Epitaphium Damonis_
which is the finest of the Latin poems. Those who read Latin will
enjoy its close parallelism with _Lycidas_ and its touches of a still
closer bond of affection, as that in which the poet contrasts the easy
friendships of birds and animals, soon won, soon lost and soon replaced
by others, with their hard rareness among men who scarcely find one
kindred spirit in a thousand, and too often lose that one by premature
fate before the fruit of {125} friendship has had time to ripen. But
if the death of Diodati aroused the deeper sorrow in Milton, that of
King produced unquestionably the greater poem. It is a common mistake
to think that to write a great elegy a man must have suffered a great
sorrow. That is not the case. Shelley wrote _Adonais_ about Keats
whom he knew very little; Spenser _Daphnaida_ about a lady whom he did
not know at all. It is not the actual experience of sorrow that the
elegiac poet needs; but the power of heart and imagination to conceive
it and the power of language to give it fit expression. Moreover, the
poet's real subject is not the death of Keats or King or Mrs. Gorges:
it is the death of all who have been or will be loved in all the world,
and the sorrow of all the survivors, the tragic destiny of youth and
hope and fame, the doom of frailty and transience which has been
eternally pronounced on so many of the fairest gi