cany waggons light."

If Milton had taken a journey for the express purpose, he could not have
described this scenery and mode of life better. Such passages are like
demonstrations of natural history. Instances might be multiplied without
end.

We might be tempted to suppose that the vividness with which he
describes visible objects, was owing to their having acquired an unusual
degree of strength in his mind, after the privation of his sight; but we
find the same palpableness and truth in the descriptions which occur in
his early poems. In Lycidas he speaks of "the great vision of the
guarded mount," with that preternatural weight of impression with which
it would present itself suddenly to "the pilot of some small
night-foundered skiff": and the lines in the Penseroso, describing "the
wandering moon,"

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

are as if he had gazed himself blind in looking at her. There is also
the same depth of impression in his descriptions of the objects of all
the different senses, whether colours, or sounds, or smells--the same
absorption of his mind in whatever engaged his attention at the time. It
has been indeed objected to Milton, by a common perversity of criticism,
that his ideas were musical rather than picturesque, as if because they
were in the highest degree musical, they must be (to keep the sage
critical balance even, and to allow no one man to possess two qualities
at the same time) proportionably deficient in other respects. But
Milton's poetry is not cast in any such narrow, common-place mould; it
is not so barren of resources. His worship of the Muse was not so simple
or confined. A sound arises "like a steam of rich distilled perfumes";
we hear the pealing organ, but the incense on the altars is also there,
and the statues of the gods are ranged around! The ear indeed
predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately affected, and
because the language of music blends more immediately with, and forms a
more natural accompaniment to, the variable and indefinite associations
of ideas conveyed by words. But where the associations of the
imagination are not the principal thing, the individual object is given
by Milton with equal force and beauty. The strongest and best proof of
this, as a characteristic power of his mind, is, that the persons of
Adam and Eve, of Satan, &c. are a