thirty he had boldly written
in public of what his mind, "in the spacious circuits of her musing,
hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest
attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and
those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse and the book of Job
a brief model . . . or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein
Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and
exemplary to a nation." For the moment nothing seemed to come of these
high words; but before he died not one only, but both of his dreams,
the drama as well as the epic, were accomplished facts. _Paradise
Lost_, begun as a drama, had become the greatest of modern {83} epics;
and the abandoned drama had reappeared in _Samson_, not the greatest of
English tragedies, but the one which best recalls the peculiar
greatness of the drama of Greece. Self-confident young men have always
been common enough, but there are two differences between them and
Milton: their performance falls far short of their promise instead of
exceeding it; and neither promise nor performance is marked by this
exalting and purifying sense of a thing divinely inspired and divinely
aided. Such work can wait, as his did, being such as is "not to be
raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like that which
flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher
fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of
dame memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that
eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and
sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch
and purify the lips of whom he pleases."

Now the task is done; and he can sit alone in his upstairs room in
Artillery Walk and thank God that in spite of blindness, private
sorrows and public disappointments, he had been enabled at last to bear
the witness of a work of immortal beauty to the high truth {84} that
had been in him even from a boy. So it may have been in the graver
moments of solitude; while, as we know from several sources, there were
other times, when he would enjoy the companionship of friends and the
homage of learned strangers by whom we are told he was "much visited,
more than he did desire." The picture suggested to us is that of a man
who at sixty-five, then a greater age than now, retained all his powers
of mind and much of the physical beau