But living where the sun

Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire
Themselves and others, I consent and run

To every mire ;

And by this world's ill-guiding light

Err more than I can do by night.

There is in God-some say—

A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky because they

See not all clear.

Oh, for that Night! where I in Him
Might live invisible and dim.

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THOMAS TRAHERNE (1636 ?-1674) appears to have been the son of John Traherne Shoemaker' of Hereford. Little is known of his life. It is probable that he was of Welsh descent, but the only accounts of his youth are to be found in the poetic descriptions of childhood, of which his writings are full. He was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, entered the ministry, and was appointed 'clerk' at Crendenhill, Herefordshire, in 1657. Among his prose works are Centuries of Meditations (from which is taken the extract printed in this book), Roman Forgeries, a controversial pamphlet directed against the Church of Rome, and a treatise on Christian Ethics. In 1667 he became chaplain to Sir Orlando, afterwards Lord Bridgman, and it was at his patron's house at Teddington that he died. His poems were not published until long after his death, and for almost two centuries he was practically forgotten.

DUMBNESS

SURE Man was born to meditate on Things,

And to contemplate the Eternal Springs

Of God and Nature, Glory, Bliss, and Pleasure,

That Life and Love might be his Heavenly Treasure:
And therefore speechless made at first, that he

Might in himself profoundly busied be;

And not vent out, before he hath taken in
Those antidotes that guard his soul from sin.

Wise Nature made him deaf too, that he might
Not be disturbed, while he doth take delight
In inward things, nor be depraved with tongues,
Nor injured by the errors and the wrongs
That mortal words convey.

This, my dear friends, this was my blessed case;
For nothing spake to me but the fair face
Of Heaven and Earth, before myself could speak.
I then my bliss did, when my silence, break.

Then did I dwell within a world of light,
Distinct and separate from all men's sight,

Where I did feel strange thoughts, and such things see
That were, or seemed, only revealed to me.
There saw I all the world enjoyed by one;
There was I in the world myself alone;
No business serious seemed but one; no work
But one was found-and that in me did lurk.
D'ye ask me what? It was with clearer eyes
To see all creatures full of deities,
Especially one's self; and to admire
The satisfaction of all true desire :

'Twas to be pleased with all that God hath done;
"Twas to enjoy even all beneath the sun :
"Twas with a steady and immediate sense
To feel and measure all the excellence
Of things; 'twas to inherit endless treasure,
And to be filled with everlasting pleasure;
To reign in silence, and to sing alone,

To see, love, covet, have, enjoy, and praise in one;
To prize and to be ravished; to be true,

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20

30

HADOW. III

Sincere, and single in a blessed view

Of all His gifts. Thus was I pent within
A fort impregnable to any sin,

Until the avenues being open laid,

Whole legions entered, and the forts betrayed;
Before which time a pulpit in my mind,

A temple and a teacher I did find,

No ear

With a large text to comment on.
But eyes themselves were all the hearers there,
And every stone and every star a tongue,
And every gale of wind a curious song.
The Heavens were an oracle, and spake
Divinity. The Earth did undertake

The office of a priest; and I being dumb
(Nothing besides was dumb), all things did come
With voices and instructions; but when I
Had gained a tongue, their power began to die.

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50

Q

CHAPTER II

MILTON

THE literary career of Milton falls naturally into three divisions. The first, from 1625 to 1640, is the period of his early poems-of the Hymn on the Nativity, of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, of Comus and Lycidas. The second, from 1640 to 1660, that is from the Long Parliament to the Restoration, is the period of his controversial pamphlets-of Areopagitica and Eikonoklastes and the great Defence of the People of England, which overthrew Salmasiusand contains virtually no poems except sonnets and a few paraphrases and translations. The third, from 1660 to 1671, is the culminating time of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, when he withdrew almost entirely from public life, and, left at liberty by the contemptuous tolerance of a government which he disowned, devoted his closing years to the service of his art.

Thus, though it is saturated with political feeling, his poetry stands in singular detachment from the actual changes and fluctuations of current events. Part was written before he entered the arena; part was written after the struggle had ended in defeat: the former sounds a few premonitory notes of conflict, like the attack on church abuses in Lycidas, but is for the most part as remote and self-contained as a college garden; in the latter he resolutely

1 The idea of treating Paradise Lost (as a Drama) was first conceived about 1641, and there is evidence that the Address to the Sun (Bk. IV, 1. 32, &c.) was composed about then for its opening. Milton, however, deliberately laid it aside and did not return to it until after 1658, when he adopted the epic form. It was finished in 1663.

fastened his study door against the world and gave himself up to solitude and to contemplation. There is hardly any poet who so little reflects the age in which he lived.

It is not here proposed to attempt, in five pages of introduction, an estimate of Milton's genius. For that last reward of consummated scholarship' the student will consult the writings of Addison and Johnson, of Hazlitt and De Quincy and Landor, of Pattison and Masson and Raleigh. A few isolated points, however, may here be noted, not because they are new, but because in the immense range and variety of the subject they are in some danger of being overlooked. The first is the vividness and accuracy of his descriptions of nature. It is true that he has little gift of pictorial compositionEve's bower, for example, is a tangle of incongruous beauties-but in the presentation of detail he is unsurpassed. His epithets are as just as they are unexpected the wan' cowslip, the 'glowing' violet, the 'russet lawns and fallows grey' of early morning. He loves the low-creeping mist in the valley; the country fragrance of grain or tedded grass or kine'; the song of birds at daybreak when the sun, clear-shining after rain, has

6

Dried the wet

On drooping plant or dropping tree.1

6

His blind eyes could behold the sky, thick with tempest, 'like a dark ceiling,' or the home-coming fleet that on the far horizon hangs in the clouds. Of all false criticisms that have been urged against Milton, the most false is that he saw Nature through the spectacles of books.

The second, so far as his self-imposed limitations would allow, is his power of delineating character. Satan, as depicted in Paradise Lost, is finely and

1 Paradise Regained, IV. 433. See the whole passage.