ineteenth-century
eyes, accustomed to the photography of our Brownings and Patmores.
Milton would probably have made light of them, and perhaps we owe him
some thanks for thus practically refuting the heresy that inspiration
implies infallibility. Yet the poetry of his blindness abounds with
proof that he had made excellent use of his eyes while he had them, and
no part of his poetry wants instances of subtle and delicate observation
worthy of the most scrutinizing modern:--

"Thee, chantress, oft the woods among,
I woo, to hear thy evensong;
And, missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry, smooth-shaven green."

"The song of the nightingale," remarks Peacock, "ceases about the time
the grass is mown." The charm, however, is less in such detached
beauties, however exquisite, than in the condensed opulence--"every
epithet a text for a canto," says Macaulay--and in the general
impression of "plain living and high thinking," pursued in the midst of
every charm of nature and every refinement of culture, combining the
ideal of Horton with the ideal of Cambridge.

"Lycidas" is far more boldly conventional, not merely in the treatment
of landscape, but in the general conception and machinery. An initial
effort of the imagination is required to feel with the poet; it is not
wonderful that no such wing bore up the solid Johnson. Talk of Milton
and his fellow-collegian as shepherds! "We know that they never drove
afield, and that they had no flocks to batten." There is, in fact,
according to Johnson, neither nature nor truth nor art nor pathos in the
poem, for all these things are inconsistent with the introduction of a
shepherd of souls in the character of a shepherd of sheep. A
nineteenth-century reader, it may be hoped, finds no more difficulty in
idealizing Edward King as a shepherd than in personifying the ocean calm
as "sleek Panope and all her sisters," which, to be sure, may have been
a trouble to Johnson. If, however, Johnson is deplorably prosaic,
neither can we agree with Pattison that "in 'Lycidas' we have reached
the high-water mark of English Poesy and of Milton's own production."
Its innumerable beauties are rather exquisite than magnificent. It is an
elegy, and cannot, therefore, rank as high as an equally consummate
example of epic, lyric, or dramatic art. Even as elegy it is surpassed
by the other great English masterpiece, "Adonais," in fire and grandeur.
There is no incongruity in "Adonais" like