ubmitted to it into that unity of beauty which is a work of art. That
is what Milton does in _Lycidas_ by the help of the pastoral fiction;
and what he could not have done without it or some imaginative
substitute for it.

The truest criticism on his pastoralism is really that that mould was
too small and fragile to hold all he wanted to put into it. The great
outburst of St. Peter, with its {128} scarcely disguised assault upon
the Laudian clergy, strains it almost to bursting. Yet no one would
wish it away; for it adds a passage of Miltonic fire to what but for
Phoebus and St. Peter would be too plaintive to be fully characteristic
of Milton whose genius lay rather in strength than in tenderness. Yet
perhaps we love _Lycidas_ all the more for giving us our almost
solitary glimpse of a Milton in whom the affections are more than the
will, and sorrow not sublimated into resolution. Its modesty, too, is
astonishing. He had already written the _Nativity Ode_, _Comus_ and
_Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, and yet he fancies himself still unripe for
poetry and is only forced by the "bitter constraint" of the death of
his friend to pluck the berries of his laurel which seem to him still
"harsh and crude"; for of course these allusions refer to his own
immaturity and not, as Todd thought, to that of his dead friend. And
the presence of the same over-mastering emotion which compelled him to
begin is felt throughout. There is no poem of his in which he appears
to make so complete a surrender to the changing moods of passion. The
verses seem to follow his heart and fancy just where they choose to
lead. We watch him as he thinks first of his friend's death and then
of the {129} duty of paying some poetic tribute to him; and so of his
own death and of some other poet of the future who may write of it and--

"bid fair peace be to my sable shroud."

How natural it is in all its superficial unnaturalness! The walks and
talks and verses made together at Cambridge so inevitably leading to
the "heavy change now thou art gone. Now thou art gone and never must
return"; and the fancy, partly but not wholly a reminiscence of their
classical studies, that the trees and flowers which they had loved
together must now be sharing the survivor's grief; the reproach to
Nature and Nature's divinities following on the thought of Nature's
sympathy, and followed by the first of the two incomparable returns
upon himself which are among the chi