some of its branches an unapproachable theme, one to be left in the high, unsearchable places of thought. This, in absolute, philosophical criticism, would seem to be the true view. There is of necessity a jar and collision, when the infinite and transcendant are made to enter finite limits, and that too under the unfamiliar forms of another's imagination. Yet when we remember that this is done in the person of Christ; when we recall the comparatively rude way in which, without reproach, it had been accomplished in painting, a much more sensual art than poetry, we believe that this first criticism should be waved, and the poet held only to the strongest, purest, most simple pitch of the imagination, as he makes for us a visible way through the invisible things of God.

This grandeur is conceded to Milton in approaching these dread unattainable precincts, this Shekinah of our religious thoughts. Do we not find, however, both in his presentation of the Deity and of Adam, some of the blemishes of a temper too positive and dogmatic? Art is not only not didactic, it will not allow the didactic spirit to disguise itself under its work. The Deity of the highest ethical art must not utter and enforce theology; nor should Adam, in the ruddy fulness, the sensual cast of our earliest physical life, impress upon Eve the principles of a school of philosophy. The criticism made upon Milton that seems to us best to hold against him is, that he was not always able perfectly to divorce himself from his dialectics, and, as the pure creative artist, to

hold his conceptions, those of God and of Adam, aloof from every bias; the one in the grandeur of his impartial, self-poised nature, the other in the simplicity and typical freedom of his unperverted and unwrought character. A positive temperament, advocacy, controversial aims, are unfavorable to art, as they warp and limit the material, and distort it to a special purpose. There is no fullness, no repose in them, and hence these fail to be found in their creations. The intensity of the Puritan spirit, so far as it lifted Milton high up in religious sentiment, was favorable, most favorable, to his poetical inspiration; so far as it bound him under pains and penalties to a limited and precise formula, it narrowed his imagination, and gave close-at-hand and harsh limits to its creations.

Milton is also criticised for imparting to Satan heroic elements; we think unjustly. Satan is not to Milton personified sin, he is a real, historic character; and neither philosophy, nor religion, and still less poetry, requires that such an one, on the instant, through his whole constitution, should be turned to weakness and corruption by the touch of evil. There are no such utter overthrows, such violent and complete transitions, in the spiritual world. Sin is an insidious mischief, that does a slow, unwholesome, subtile work. It should find access to an archangel under the disguise of a noble, independent, courageous impulse, and, once seated in the heart, turn it steadily to adamantine pride and hardness, with such phosphorescent flashes

of dying virtue as the decayed, irritable mood of a great soul may suffer. Religious art too often mistakes sin, fails of its true paternity, and true descent, by not tracing the slow, sure way in which it unknits the virtuous nature, loosens the passions, and, abolishing one divine law after another, turns all things into misrule, anarchy and night; the bitter and exasperate brood of appetite and lust. If we discern this fearful and steady descent of sin, it is far more dreadful than one mad plunge, which annihilates distance, and puts instantly the damned one beyond the range of vision and sympathy. Even physical spaces must be traversed, and so defined for the mind.

"Nine days they fell; confounded chaos roar'd,

And felt tenfold confusion in their fall

Through his wild anarchy."

This epic of Milton has helped to close the door on the epic of mere war and violence, and to affect a transfer of the truly heroic into more purely moral realms. Henceforward we wait on the battles of spirits, and the struggle of invisible and spiritual powers.

We have placed Milton in the Elizabethan age, not because he belongs there in a mere time division, but because of his affinity with the great inventive spirits that composed it. As a root sends up, at a distance from the parent stock, a rival tree, so did this first creative force, binding back Milton in close sympathy to Spenser, after its own proper era had passed by, yield one more of its most vigorous products, planted in the middle of

the following period. Eras lie interlaced, new forces rising in the heart of an old age, old forces lost to the eye in the heart of a new age.

We now turn to a transition period, the last half of the seventeenth century, lying between one of criticism and one of creation. It is a period of violent contrasts. Society was broken up by extreme tendencies, and literature was divided and shaped by the spirit of the party to which, in its several forms, it was attached. The liberty of thought be gotten by the reformation in England had been genuine and general. The nation, though aroused and strengthened by it, had, in the reign of Elizabeth, been held together. Under her successors religious and political liberty became closely united, and rapid, earnest minds began to draw off into distinct parties. The most progressive tendency, primarily religious, secondarily political, was that of the Puritans. Against them the royalists, the supporters of the established church and government, were arrayed. As in all revolutionary times, moderate and intermediate opinions became powerless, and an open conflict, ripening into civil war, swept away minor differences, consolidating the two extreme parties that held the field. Reform is rarely universal. It involves, therefore, separation, the parting of elements, which have been comparatively homogeneous, mutually restraining each other from extreme tendencies. No sooner, however, do the portions of society begin to divide, to stand in direct repulsion, than, electric equilibrium being overthrown, we have two defined and intense poles

of counteraction. Opposite tendencies, which before checked, now irritate and enhance, each other; and cause the attitude of both parties to become more extreme than it would be, if each were left to its own free bent. The sweeping away of intervening persons and parties, the steady concentration of hostile camps, the looking upon every act and measure first of all in its belligerent character, the blinding and distorting effect of mutual hatred, all serve to give a violent wrench and warp to the minds of either division, and force upon them an extreme, and often irrational, attitude, begotten of collision, and quite opposed to sober, constructive, proportionate thought.

It is this which makes reformatory periods so critical. A dividing line appears, and men are driven to the one side or the other, often sadly against the minor tendencies of their constitution. Those who are reluctant to cast up accounts, to strike a balance, or to settle, by leading considerations, their method of action, find themselves tossed about by a conflict they cannot still, and at length compelled to shelter themselves under opinions they would never willingly have accepted. The reign of Elizabeth had been one of coalescence, and thus of mutual restraint; those of James and of Charles were marked, first by separation, then by intense strife.

The Puritan character was not the product of peace, but of war; it had grown up beaten on and bowed by severe winds. It showed in every limb and twig the twist of the strong currents in which it