s spiritual kindred. Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, write
incessantly; whatever care they may bestow upon composition, the
impulse to produce is never absent. With Milton it is commonly dormant
or ineffectual; he is always studying, but the fertility of his mind
bears no apparent proportion to the pains devoted to its cultivation. He
is not, like Wordsworth, labouring at a great work whose secret progress
fills him with a majestic confidence; or, like Coleridge, dreaming of
works which he lacks the energy to undertake; or, save once, does he
seem to have felt with Keats:--

"Fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before that books, in high piled charactery,
Hold in rich garners the full ripened grain."

He neither writes nor wishes to write; he simply studies, piling up the
wood on the altar, and conscious of the power to call down fire from
Heaven when he will. There is something sublime in this assured
confidence; yet its wisdom is less evident than its grandeur. "No man,"
says Shelley, "can say, 'I will compose poetry.'" If he cannot say this
of himself to-day, still less can he say it of himself to-morrow. He
cannot tell whether the illusions of youth will forsake him wholly;
whether the joy of creation will cease to thrill; what unpropitious
blight he may encounter in an enemy or a creditor, or harbour in an
uncongenial mate. Milton, no doubt, entirely meant what he said when he
told Diodati: "I am letting my wings grow and preparing to fly, but my
Pegasus has not yet feathers enough to soar aloft in the fields of air."
But the danger of this protracted preparation was shown by his narrow
escape from poetical shipwreck when the duty of the patriot became
paramount to that of the poet. The Civil War confounded his
anticipations of leisurely composition, and but for the disguised
blessing of his blindness, the mountain of his attainment might have
been Pisgah rather than Parnassus.

It is in keeping with the infrequency of Milton's moods of overmastering
inspiration, and the strength of will which enabled him to write
steadily or abstain from writing at all, that his early compositions
should be, in general, so much more correct than those of other English
poets of the first rank. The childish bombast of "Titus Andronicus," the
commonplace of Wordsworth, the frequent inanity of the youthful
Coleridge and the youthful Byron, Shelley's extravagance, Keats's
cockneyism