nd hath need of thee."

And, what seems stranger, he has now had in return a kind of reflected
influence upon Milton. The total experience of a reader of poetry is a
thing of many actions and reactions, co-operating and intermingling
with each other. And as we can hardly read Virgil or the Psalms now
without thinking of all {140} that has come of them, and reading some
of it back into the old words whose first creator could not foresee all
that would be found in them, so it is with Milton and Wordsworth.
There are many things in Milton which no Wordsworthian can now read
exactly as they were read in the seventeenth century. Wordsworth's line

"Thy Soul was like a Star and dwelt apart"

was strangely true of Milton as he lived in his own day. But it is
less true now that his place is among the spiritual company of the
English poets and that Wordsworth stands by his side, or sits at his
feet. That does not detract from his greatness. Indeed, it adds to
it; for it is only the greater poets who thus transcend their own day
and cannot be read as if they belonged to it alone. Read the great
sonnet on the Massacre--

"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
{141}
Forget not; in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks.
Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

Is there not more in it than the Hebrew prophet or psalmist and the
English Puritan? Is there not, for us now, something beside the past
of which Milton had read, and the present which he knew by experience?
Is there not an anticipation of another struggle against another
tyrant--nay, the creation of the very spirit in which that struggle was
to be faced? So Milton influences Wordsworth and the England of
Wordsworth's day; and they in their turn inevitably influence our minds
as we read him. There lies one part of the secret of his greatness; a
part which is seen at its highest in his sonnets.

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