over the dissolution of the gods like a proper Christian, he is evidently regretting and lingering over them, as was natural to a poet. He need not have lamented. A proper sense of universality knows how to reconcile the real beauty of all creeds; and the gods survive in the midst of his own epic, lifted by his own hand above the degradation to which he has thrust them. Vulcan, he says, was called Mammon in heaven, and was a fallen angel. But he has another name for him better than either. Hear how he rolls the harmony of his vowels.

66

Nor was his name unheard, or unador'd
In ancient Greece; and in Ausonian land
Men call'd him Mulciber; and how he fell
From heav'n, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements. From morn
To noon he fell; :- from noon to dewy eve,-
A summer's day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star

On Lemnos th' Ægean Isle. Thus they relate,
Erring.

PAR. LOST, Book I.

"Not more than you did," Homer might have said to him in Elysium, "when you called my divine architect a sordid archangel fond of gold, and made him fall from a state of perfect holiness and bliss, which was impossible." Brother, brother," Milton might have said, glancing at the author of the "Beggar's Opera," "we were both in the wrong; -except when you were painting Helen and Andromache, or sending your verses forward like a devouring fire."

"Or you,” would the heroic ancient rejoin, “when you made us acquainted with the dignity of those two gentle creatures in Paradise, and wrote verses full of tranquil superiority, which make mine appear to me like the talking of Mars compared with that of Jupiter."

No heathen paradise, according to Milton, could compare with his; yet in saying so, he lingers so fondly among the illegal shades that it is doubtful which he prefers.

Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpine, gathering flowers,

Herself a fairer flow'r by gloomy Dis

Was gather'd; which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world; nor that sweet grove
Of Daphne, by Orontes, and the inspir'd
Castalian spring, might with this Paradise

Of Eden strive; nor that Nyseian isle

Girt with the river Triton, where old Cham
Whom gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove,

Hid Amalthea, and her florid son,

Young Bacchus, from his step-dame Rhea's eye.

Milton had, in fact, settled this question of the indestructibility of paganism in his youth. His college exercises showing that "nature could not grow old," showed also that the gods and goddesses must remain with her. The style of Milton's Latin verses is founded on Ovid; but his love of a conscious and sonorous music renders it his own, and perhaps there is nothing more like the elder English Milton than these young exercises of his in a classical language.

Dr. Johnson objects to Milton's Lycidas (which is an elegy on a lost companion of his studies), that "passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy; nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius; nor tells of rough Satyrs and Fauns with cloven heel." To which Wharton very properly answers, "but poetry does this: and in the hands of Milton does it with a peculiar and irresistible charm. Subordinate poets exercise no invention when they tell how a shepherd has lost a companion, and must feed his flocks alone, without any judge of his skill in piping; but Milton

dignifies and adorns these common artificial incidents with
unexpected touches of picturesque beauty, with the graces
of sentiment and with the novelties of original genius."
Wharton says further, that "poetry is not always uncon-
nected with passion," and then gives an instance out of
the poem where Milton speaks of the body of his lost
friend. But he might have added that poetry itself is a
passion; that Fleet Street and "the Mitre," though very
good things, are not the only ones; that these two young
friends lived in the imaginative, as well as the every-day
world; that the survivor most probably missed the com-
panion of his studies more on the banks of the Arethuse
and the Mincius, than he did in the college grounds; in
short, that there is a state of poetical belief, in which the
images of truth and beauty which are by their nature
lasting, become visible and affecting to the mind in pro-
portion to the truth and beauty of its own tact for univer-
sality. Bacon, though no poet, had it, and adorned his
house with pagan sculptures; because, being a universal
philosopher, he included a knowledge of what was poetical.
All the poets have had it as a matter of course, more or
less;
but the greatest most of all. Shakespeare included
it for the very reason that he left no part of the world un-
sympathized with; namely, that he was, of all poets, the
most universal.

Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;
An

eye like Mars to threaten and command;
A station like the herald Mercury,

New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.

These Miltonic lines flowed from the same pen that recorded the vagaries of Falstaff and Mrs. Quickly. Dr. Johnson would have made a bad business of the heathen mythology. He did so when he made a Turk pull his

He was

enemy out of the "Pleiad's golden chariot."* conversant only with what is called real life; wonderfully well indeed, and with great wit and good sense; but there he stopped. He might have as soon undertaken to describe a real piece of old poetical beauty, or passion either, as clap his wig on the head of Apollo. He laughed with reason at Prior, for comparing his Chloes to Venus and Diana, and talking of their going out a hunting with ivory quivers graceful at their side. This was the French notion of using the Greek fables; and with the French, indeed, the heathen mythology became the most spurious and the most faded of drugs. They might as well have called a box of millinery the oracle of Delphi. The Germans understood it better, but we do not think it has ever been revived to more beautiful account than in the young poetry and remote haunts of imagination of the late Mr. Keats. He lamented that he could not do it justice. "Oh, how unlike," he cries, speaking of the style of his fine poem, Hyperion,

To that large utterance of the early gods!

But this was the modesty of a real poet. Milton himself would have been happy to read his Hyperion aloud, and to have welcomed the new spirit among the choir of poets, with its

Elysian beauty, melancholy grace.

Mr. Shelley beautifully applied to his young friend the distich of Plato upon Agathon, who having been, he says, a morning star among the living, was now an evening

* In his tragedy of Irene. Gibbon has noticed it somewhere in the Decline and Fall.

star in the shades. Here, also, was the true taste of the antique. Nay, it is possible that the melancholy of modern genius to the eyes of which a larger and obscurer world has been thrown open, may have discovered a more imaginative character in the mythology of the ancient poets, than accompanies our usual notion of it. The cheerfulness of all those poets, except the dramatic ones, and the everlasting and visible youth of their sculptures, come before us, and make us think of nothing but Pan and Pomona, of Bacchus, Apollo, and the Graces. Nor is it possible to deny that this is the general and perhaps the just impression, though exaggerated; and that the Pythian organ, with all its grandeur, does not roll such peals.

Of pomp and threatening harmony

as those of the old Gregorian chapels, and the mingling hierarchies of earth and heaven.* Unfortunately the grandest parts of all religions have hitherto appealed to the least respectable of our passions, our fear. It is the beauty of the truly divine part of Christianity that it appeals to love; and if it then inspires melancholy, it is one of a nobler sort, animating us to endeavor and promising a state of things, to which the grandeur both of Paganism and Catholicism may become as the dreams of remembered sickness in infancy.

At all events, it is certain that some of the great modern poets in consequence of their remoteness from the age of pagan belief, and its every-day effect on the mind, often

* On the Feast of St. Michael and All Saints, the Catholic Church believes that the whole of the faithful on earth and in heaven, with all the angelical hierarchies, are lifting up their voices in unison! one of the sublimest and most beautiful fancies that ever entered into the heart of man.