eckled vanity;
smouldering clouds; hideous hum; dismal dance; dusky eyne:_ there are
many such, each almost a poem in itself. The whole is a succession of
pictures set in the loveliest music for the utterance of grandest
thoughts.

No doubt there are in the poem instances of such faults in style as were
common in the age in which his verse was rooted: for my own part, I never
liked the first two stanzas of the hymn. But such instances are few;
while for a right feeling of the marvel of this poem and of the two
preceding it, we must remember that Milton was only twenty-one when he
wrote them.

Apparently to make one of a set with the _Nativity_, he began to write an
ode on the _Passion_, but, finding the subject "above the years he had
when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it
unfinished." The fragment is full of unworthy, though skilful, and, for
such, powerful conceits, but is especially interesting as showing how
even Milton, trying to write about what he felt, but without yet having
generated thoughts enow concerning the subject itself, could only fall
back on conventionalities. Happy the young poet the wisdom of whose
earliest years was such that he recognized his mistake almost at the
outset, and dropped the attempt! Amongst the stanzas there is, however,
one of exceeding loveliness:

He, sovereign priest, stooping his regal head,
That dropped with odorous oil down his fair eyes,
Poor fleshly tabernacle entered,
His starry front low-roofed beneath the skies.
Oh what a masque was there! what a disguise!
Yet more! the stroke of death he must abide;
Then lies him meekly down fast by his brethren's side.

In this it will be seen that he has left the jubilant measure of the
_Hymn_, and returned to the more stately and solemn rhyme-royal of its
overture, as more suited to his subject. Milton could not be wrong in his
music, even when he found the quarry of his thought too hard to work.

CHAPTER XV.

EDMUND WALLER, THOMAS BROWN, AND JEREMY TAYLOR.

Edmund Waller, born in 1605, was three years older than Milton; but I had
a fancy for not dividing Herbert and Milton. As a poet he had a high
reputation for many years, gained chiefly, I think, by a regard to
literary proprieties, combined with wit. He is graceful sometimes; but
what in his writings would with many pass for grace, is only smoothness
and the absence of faults. His horses were not difficult to drive. He