TALK XXX.

MILTON'S COMUS, PARADISE LOST, AND SAMSON AGON

ISTES.

I HAVE before told you something about the masques, a kind of dramatic entertainment fashionable all through the reign of Elizabeth to the time of Charles I. These masques were performed in the court, or in the palaces of the nobility, and were often a part of the Christmas entertainment in the houses of the wealthy people. At that time no women ever performed in the plays in any public theater, but in these masques, or private entertainments, the ladies, as well as the gentlemen, took part. It was, therefore, quite the fashion to write a masque, and the best writers of the time were proud to try their hand at it. Lord Bacon wrote several, in the time of Elizabeth and James I., and all the great dramatic poets, except Shakspeare, have one or more among their works. We shall not be surprised, therefore, to learn that Milton wrote two masques-the Comus and Arcades. The last of these, which is only a fragment, was played before the Countess of Derby, at Hatfield, by some of her family, and Comus was given at Ludlow Castle, the estate of the Earl of Bridgewater. The chief characters in Comus, a young maiden and her brothers, were played by the Lady Alice Egerton, daughter of the Earl, and his sons, Lord Brackly and Sir Thomas Egerton. The story is of a lady, who, in coming through the forest, is separated from her two brothers, her companions. The wood is haunted by Comus, a spirit of unwholesome mirth, who, with a crew of monsters in the forms of men with the heads of beasts, is holding

wild revels there. Comus, disguised as a shepherd, under pretense of leading the lady to her brothers, beguiles. her to his palace, where he tries to bring her under his enchantments; but as she is too pure and good to be harmed by his spells, he leaves her, after succeeding in fixing her to a chair in the banquet room, which holds her fast so that she cannot move from it. Here she is found by her brothers, led by her guardian spirit, and with the aid of the river nymph, Sabrina, she is rescued and brought to her father's castle.

This is the plot of Comus, which Milton is said to have founded on the fact that the Lady Alice had recently missed her way in some woodland excursion, and thus caused some alarm to her friends. It is a very simple plot, but Milton has woven on it a most exquisite play. It is too perfect a whole to quote in passages, and must be read entire, but no one who wishes to know Milton as a poet in youth should fail to read the Comus.

It is as a poet that we consider Milton, and so we must pass by his prose works, many of which were written in Latin; but, in passing, I must tell you that his plea for the liberty of the press (a prose tract which bears the hard title of Areopagitica), is the one of all his prose works best worth your reading. Milton's pen and influence were generally used for freedom-freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of belief-and although there are occasions on which he was not so generous as we, who live in the present, might wish he had been, yet he was so far ahead of his time in his thought, that we must admire him as a grand mouth-piece of Liberty.

There is something that touches the heart in the picture we have of him in the last of life, when he sat down, blind and poor, to write Paradise Lost. I am sorry that very few people now-a-days read Paradise Lost, and I fear as time goes on that it will be even less read. Unfortunately, the poem in its subject and its characters does not come within the scope of human interests, and the greatest poet in the

world would find it difficult to keep his readers from yawning if he did not write about things that excite the sympathy or touch the emotions. It is next to impossible to feel a lively interest in the disputes of fiends in hell, or in the fortunes of a pair of human beings so remote as Adam and Eve. Notwithstanding the grand style and organ-like melody of Paradise Lost, it can hold the attention of few readers, and a great many who attempt to read it, put it away as tiresome. Yet any one who has an ear for a grand poetic measure, so superb in harmony that it has never been equalled in English verse from Chaucer to this day, must be charmed by Milton's mighty line. It seems to me that the poet's early musical training shows in his style. It is after the manner of a grand instrument; your ear would be held captive if you did not heed the sense, and from beginning to end, wherever his theme leads him, he preserves the same unbroken harmony.

That Milton was able to touch the heart of his reader, and that, if he had chosen a subject within the sphere of natural, human sympathy, he could have held the interest, is proved by the fact that, when he claims our sympathy, he does it with great power. We shall feel this in Book Third of Paradise Lost, which begins by an all-hail to Light, "Offspring of Heaven, first born," where he goes on with touching sadness:

"but thou

Revisit'st not these eyes,, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander, where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit.

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Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling and in shadiest covert hid,

Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns

Day, or the sweet approach of even and morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank

Of nature's works, to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mists from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight."

In his tragedy of Samson, Milton also touches on the same subject in a strain of patient and majestic sorrow. It seems as if the figure of the blind Samson was akin to Milton, and that he chose him for his hero because he felt the resemblance. Thus Samson soliloquizes as he sits in Gaza:

"But, peace, I must not quarrel with the will

Of highest dispensation, which herein
Haply had ends above my reach to know;
Suffices that to me strength is my bane,
And proves the source of all my miseries,
So many and so huge, that each apart
Would ask a life to wail, but chief of all,
O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind, among enemies, O worse than chains,
Dungeon or beggary, or decrepit age!

Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
And all her various objects of delight

Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased.
Inferior to the vilest now become

Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me;
They creep, yet see; I, dark, in light exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool
In power of others, never in my own;

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half,
O, dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon
Irrevocably dark, total eclipse,

Without all hope of day!

O first created Beam, and thou great Word,
Let there be light, and light was over all,
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
The sun to me is dark

And silent as the moon

When she deserts the night,

Hid in the vacant interlunar cave,
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
That light is in the soul,

She all in every part; why was the sight
To such a tender ball as th' eye confined,
So obvious, and so easy to be quenched,
And not as feeling through all parts diffused,
That she might look at will through every pore?
Then had I not been thus exiled from light,
As in the land of darkness, yet in light.
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried; but, O yet more miserable,
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave,
Buried, yet not exempt

By privilege of death and burial

From most of other evils, pains and wrongs,
But hereby made obnoxious more

To all the miseries of life

Life in captivity

Among inhuman foes."

Milton's later poetry must be read in grand passages like these, to be appreciated. There are few young readers who will read Paradise Lost entire, and they will be likely to enjoy his youthful poems most. Indeed, we are not apt to be pleased with epic poetry in youth. The incidents of the dramatic poem, or the music of the lyric, then please us best, and it is not until life is mature that we can see fully the greatness of Homer and Milton, and set them in their place among the poets of the world.

But if we did not care for Milton's poetry, we should