ir rancorous roar,
Leagued with fanatic frenzy, blood-defiled,
To the sweet Muses and himself untrue,--
Around the head he loved thick darkness threw.

--He goes:--But with him glides the Pleiad throng
Of that imperial line, whom Phoebus owns
His ownest: for, since his, no later song
Has soar'd, as wide-wing'd, to the diadem'd thrones
That, in their inmost heaven, the Muses high
Set for the sons of immortality.

Most loved, most lovely, near him as he went,
Vergil: and He, supremest for all time,
In hoary blindness:--But the sweet lament
Of Lesbian love, the Parian song sublime,
Follow'd:--and that stern Florentine apart
Cowl'd himself dark in thought, within his heart

Nursing the dream of Church and Caesar's State,
Empire and Faith:--while Fancy's favourite child,
The myriad-minded, moving up sedate
Beckon'd his countryman, and inly smiled:--
Then that august Theophany paled from view,
To higher stars drawn up, and kingdoms new.

The last ten years of Milton's life were passed at his house situate in
the (then) 'Artillery Walk,' Bunhill, near Aldersgate. He is described
as a spare figure, of middle stature or a little less, who walked,
generally clothed in a gray camblet overcoat, in the streets between
Bunhill and Little Britain.

_Vergil_; placed first as most like Milton in consummate art and
permanent exquisiteness of phrase. It is to him, also, (if to any one),
that Milton is metrically indebted.--The other poets classed as
'Imperial' are Homer, Sappho, Archilochus, Dante, Shakespeare. The
supremacy in rank which the writer has here ventured to limit to these
seven poets, (though with a strong feeling of diffidence in view of
certain other Hellenic and Roman claims), is assigned to Sappho and
Archilochus, less on account of the scanty fragments, though they be
'more golden than gold,' which have reached us, than in confidence that
the place collateral with Homer, given them by their countrymen (who
criticized as admirably as they created), was, in fact, justified by
their poetry.

_The dream_; Dante's political wishes and speculations, wholly opposed to
Milton's, are, however, like his in their impracticable originality.

_Theophany_; Vision of the Gods.

WHITEHALL GALLERY

February 11: 1655

As when the King of old
'Mid Babylonian gold,
And picture-woven walls, and lamps that gleam'd
Unholy radiance, sate,
And with some smooth slave-mate
Toy'd, and the wine