The preceding poems,-whether tasks imposed on his genius, or its voluntary effusions, written toward the close of Milton's academic career, and when his thoughts were very much directed toward theology,-have a solemn, serious, religious cast, suitable to the frame of mind in which we may suppose him to have been at that period. But when he had abandoned all thoughts of adopting the Church as a profession, and had retired to the rural seclusion of Horton, his mind took a different turn, and his poetry in consequence assumed a gayer attire; and it is perhaps no unsafe mode of procedure to assign to Horton all his poetry of a brighter hue, and in which we meet with rural imagery.

SONG ON MAY MORNING.

No date is assigned to this charming song, but we think there can hardly be a doubt of its having been written at Horton, on some lovely morning in the month of May.

The commencement and conclusion are in five-foot, the song in four-foot measure.

SONNET II. [I.] TO THE NIGHTINGALE.

We would also assign these beautiful lines to Horton, and to the month of May, for the reasons given above. In our eyes this sonnet is absolute perfection, and most certainly equal to anything of the kind in the Italian or any other language. Yet Johnson, it seems, could discern no merit in it; and even Wordsworth, as we have seen, did not rank it among those to which he gave the preference.

The concluding lines of this sonnet should serve as a warning to critics and biographers not to be too ready to

find traits of personal history in the productions of poets. We might, for instance, be induced to infer from it, that Milton was the victim of a hopeless attachment, and a very pretty theory might be formed from it, taken in conjunction with the first of his Latin elegies. We have indeed quoted above a little romance, to which it may have given occasion. But we know very well that such was not the case. The poet, in fact, as any one who has written verses must be well aware, is like the painter; a subject presents itself to the mind of the one and he paints it, of the other and he puts it into a poetic form, assuming the character of the lover, the hero, or whatever it may be, for the occasion, and then returning to his ordinary frame of mind. A recollection of this truth would dispel more than one ingenious theory.

L'ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO.

During the happy period of Milton's life spent at Horton, though his mind was occupied by pursuits of the highest intellectual nature, yet poetry undoubtedly was not discarded from his thoughts; and he probably had always steadily in view his design of producing one day a poem which "the world would not willingly let die." Meanwhile, as if by way of prelude, his mind occasionally relaxed itself in poetic composition to oblige his friends, or to give expression to some idea which had presented itself in an attractive form. Such were the subjects of the two beautiful poems now under consideration, which, though the exact date cannot be ascertained, were beyond question written at Horton.

It may possibly be-as Warton, always anxious to derogate from the fame of Milton, maintains-that the idea was suggested by the verses prefixed to Burton's

Anatomy of Melancholy, or by a song in Beaumont and Fletcher's Nice Valour; but we rather think that it rose spontaneously in the poet's own mind. At all events, Milton seems to have conceived the idea of enumerating and representing the objects more likely to attract the attention of a man of a lively, cheerful temperament, and of another whose disposition was thoughtful and serious. They form a pair of poetic pendents, as we often see pictures in a gallery, and he gave them the respective Italian titles of L'Allegro, or the Cheerful Man, and Il Penseroso, or the Thoughtful Man. The measure which he selected for these poems was the fourfoot iambic, then so much in use, and equally adapted for light or serious subjects. On the true nature of this measure we have already offered some observations.

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Even Johnson is obliged to allow that of these poems opinion is uniform; every man that reads them, reads them with pleasure;" and he terms them "two noble efforts of imagination." Warton, with all his prejudices, also had too much poetic feeling not to be charmed with them. From Hallam they receive unlimited praise. In fact, it is utterly impossible that any one with even a particle of poetic feeling could read them with any sentiments but those of delight and admiration. The only objection which Johnson makes seems to be founded on his ignorance of the exact meaning of the Italian terms employed by Milton. "I know not," says he, "whether the characters are kept sufficiently apart. No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy, but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth." But if he had adhered to his own translation of Allegro, cheerful, he might have seen that mirth in its usual sense was not included in its meaning, but merely tranquil, quiet pleasure, that,

in fact, of a philosophic mind; and if he had understood the exact meaning of Penseroso, which he most incorrectly renders by Pensive,* he would have seen that though Melancholy (la douce Mélancolie)† is invoked, Il Penseroso is not by any means what we term a pensive or melancholy man.

Warton, too, commits an error, when he says that "No man was ever so disqualifed to turn Puritan as Milton. In both these poems he professes himself to be highly pleased with the choral church-music, with Gothic cloisters, the painted windows and vaulted aisles of a venerable cathedral, with tilts and tournaments, and with masks and pageantries." Whatever Milton's real feelings may have been respecting these objects-and he. surely was not insensible to the charms of cathedral music or Gothic architecture-we are not justified in deducing any such inferences from the poems. There is, as we have just observed, no greater, though no more. common, error, than that of finding the real sentiments and feelings of a poet in his verses. Every good poet is more or less of a dramatist; he assumes a particular character, or places himself in a peculiar situation, and then thinks and expresses himself as he supposes he should if he were such a person, or so situated. So Milton, conceiving himself to be a man of a cheerful or of a serious mood, looks round him and selects the objects most likely to interest such a person.

Though loath to venture to find a fault in such perfect

* The Italian word is pensieroso, not penseroso, from pensiero, and its proper sense is thoughtful, never pensive, which is pensoso.

"There is a joy in grief when peace dwells in the bosom of the sad," is the beautiful Ossianic expression. Another, equally beautiful, is, "Like the memory of joys that are past, pleasant and mournful to the soul."

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works of so great a poet, we must say that the origin assigned to Melancholy, however philosophically just it may be, has always grated on our feelings. The species of incest there described is such as no ideas of a Golden Age, or any particular state of society, can make accord with our moral instincts, and we must confess that we wish the poet had assigned her different parents. Possibly Milton's mind was influenced by the chorus respecting the Golden Age in Tasso's Aminta, where the morality is certainly not of the finest.

The sequence of ideas in these, the first descriptive poems in our language, is as follows.

The Cheerful Man, after driving away Melancholy, whom he portrays in the darkest colours, invokes Euphrosyne or Mirth, one of the Graces whom Venus bore to Bacchus, or, as he rather chooses to believe, the offspring of Zephyrus and Flora. He invites her to come with all her train, and to "admit him of her crew," and then proceeds to enumerate the circumstances and objects which will yield him pleasure. He commences at daybreak with the song of the lark, then he hears and sees the cock among his dames, and next listens to the hound and horn echoing from the hill-side and through the woods. He walks at this hour of prime over hillocks and among hedgerows toward the east, where the sun is now rising, amid the clouds of various hues. He hears the ploughman, the milkmaid, the mower, and the shepherd, at their various occupations. His eye surveys the landscape round, the lawns and fallows, mountains, meads, brooks and rivers. At a distance is a castellated edifice embosomed in trees, the abode, it may be, of some high-born beauty; at hand, rises from between two aged oaks, the smoke from the chimney of a cot