rge it with all your might. All the while
you will be doing just what I desire you to do, using "Job"
alongside "Prometheus Unbound" and "Paradise Lost" as a
comparative work of literature.

But, if you ask me for my own opinion why Milton and Shelley
dropped their intention to make poems on the "Book of Job," it is
that they no sooner tackled it than they found it to be a
magnificent poem already, and a poem on which, with all their
genius, they found themselves unable to improve.

I want you to realise a thing most simple, demonstrable by five
minutes of practice, yet so confused by conventional notions of
what poetry is that I dare say it to be equally demonstrable that
Milton and Shelley discovered it only by experiment. Does this
appear to you a bold thing to say of so tremendous an artist as
Milton? Well, of course it would be cruel to quote in proof his
paraphrases of Psalms cxiv and cxxxvi: to set against the
Authorised Version's

When Israel went out of Egypt,
The house of Jacob from a people of strange language

such pomposity as

When the blest seed of Terah's faithful son
After long toil their liberty had won--

or against

O give thanks....
To him that stretched out the earth above the waters:
for his mercy endureth for ever.
To him that made great lights:
for his mercy endureth for ever

such stuff as

Who did the solid earth ordain
To rise above the watery plain;
_For his mercies aye endure,_
_Ever faithful, ever sure._
Who, by his all-commanding might,
Did fill the new-made world with light;
_For his mercies aye endure,_
_Ever faithful, ever sure._

verses yet further weakened by the late Sir William Baker for
"Hymns Ancient and Modern."

It were cruel, I say, to condemn these attempts as little above
those of Sternhold and Hopkins, or even of those of Tate and
Brady: for Milton made them at fifteen years old, and he who
afterwards consecrated his youth to poetry soon learned to know
better. And yet, bearing in mind the passages in "Paradise Lost"
and "Paradise Regained" which paraphrase the Scriptural
narrative, I cannot forbear the suspicion that, though as an
artist he had the instinct to feel it, he never quite won to
_knowing_ the simple fact that the thing had already been done
and surpassingly well done: he, who did so much to liberate
poetry from rhyme--he--even he who in the grand choruses