of joyous wonder among the sons of God? Thus died Milton, the prince of modern men, accepting death as gently and silently as the sky receives into its arms the waning moon. We are reminded of a description in "Hyperion," of the death of Goethe: "His majestic eyes looked for the last time on the light of a pleasant spring morning. Calm like a god, the old man sat, and, with a smile, seemed to bid farewell to the light of day, on which he had gazed for more than eighty years. Books were near him, and the pen which had just dropped from his dying fingers. Open the shutters, and let in more light,' were his last words. Slowly stretching forth his hand, he seemed to write in the air, and, as it sank down again and was motionless, the spirit of the old man was gone."

The next portion of our task is, to speak of the constituents of Milton's mind. Many critics have spoken of him as one who possessed only two or three faculties in a supreme and almost supernatural degree. They speak of his imagination and intellect as if they were his all. Now, in fact, Milton, as well as Goethe or Shakspeare, seems to us a many-sided man. He was complete in all powers and accomplishments, almost as his own Adam. He had every faculty, both of body and of mind, well developed and finely harmonized. He had philosophic sagacity, and could, upon occasion, reason as acutely as Thomas Aquinas. He had broad grasp as well as subtle discrimination, and some of his treatises nearly exhaust the topics of which they treat. He had, in vast measure, understanding, the power which comprehends; memory, the power which retains; imagination, the power which combines and reproduces; will, the power which moves; and eloquence, the power which communicates. He had, besides, the subordinate talents of wit, sarcasm, invective, rhetoric, and logic; even the characters of the sophist and the buffoon he could adopt at pleasure. In what species of literature did he not shine? In the epic, in the drama, in the pastoral, in the ode, in the elegy, in the masque, in the sonnet, in the epistle, in the song, in the satire, in the argument, in the essay, in the religious discussion, in the history, and in the etymological treatise, he was equally a master. He added more than the versatility of Voltaire to more than the sublimity of Homer.

While Voltaire skips from topic to topic with the agility of an elated monkey, Milton's versatility reminds you of the great Scripture image, "The mountains leaping like rams, and the hills like lambs." And if it be asked, what was it that gave him that august air of unity, which has made many overlook his multiform nature? We answer, it was the subordination of all his varied powers to a religious purpose, such as we find in no other uninspired man; and it was again, that glare of awful grandeur which shone around him in all his motions, and made even his least efforts, even his failures, and almost his blunders, great. As St. Peter's in Rome seems one, because it unites, condenses, and rounds in all the minutiae and details of its fabric into a dome, so lofty and proud that it seems a copy of the sky to which it points to imitate as well as to adore-so Milton gathers in all the spoils of time, and all the faculties of man, and offers them as in one sacrifice, and on one vast altar to heaven.

In attempting a climactic arrangement of his poetical works, we may trace his whole life over again, as in a calm under-current; not that, in point of chronological order, his works form a complete history of the man, inasmuch as "Paradise Lost," in which his genius culminated, preceded "Samson Agonistes "-still some of the epochs of his life are distinctly marked by the advancing stages of his writings. Lowest in the scale, then, are usually ranked his Latin poems, which, with many beauties, are rather imitations and echoes of the classical poets than the native utterances of his mind; it is in them, as in many modern Latin and Greek poems, where the strange dress, the graceful veil, the coy half-perceived meaning, as with the beauty of female coquettes, give a factitious interest to very ordinary and commonplace thoughts. Half the merit of the classics themselves springs from the difficulty we have in understanding them, and if we wish effectually to disguise nonsense, let us roll it up in Greek or Latin verse, and it may lie there unsuspected for centuries together. Milton could not write nonsense, to be sure, even in Latin, but his usual power and majesty here well nigh forsake him; and in hexameters and pentameters he walks like a Titan in irons, and in irons too narrow for his limbs. We may rank next, as next lowest in popular estimation, his sonnets. We are not sure,

however, but that popular estimation has underrated those productions. Dr. Johnson certainly did. When asked once his opinion of Milton's sonnets, he said, "Milton could hew out a Colossus from a rock, but he could not carve heads upon cherry-stones." Literally, of course, he could not do either the one or the other; but had he been a sculptor, we believe that the slightest stroke of his chisel would, as well as his most elaborate work, have evinced the master. Hogarth's genius appeared as really in those sketches which he used. to draw on his thumb-nail, as in his "Rake's Progress," or Marriage a la Mode." So Milton's sonnets are sonnets which Milton, and none but Milton, could have written. We see, in the compass of a crown-piece, his most peculiar qualities his gravity, his severe and simple grandeur, his chaste and chary expression, his holy purpose, and the lofty and solitary character of his soul. His mind might be compared to a mountain river, which having first torn its way through high rocks, then polishes the pebbles over which it rolls at their base.

""Tis the same wind unbinds the Alpine snow,
And comforts violets on their lowly beds."

We confess, however, that we are not much in love with the structure of the sonnet. Its principle, which is to include into fourteen lines one thought or sentiment, seems too artificial, and savors too much of the style of taste from which have sprung anagrams and acrostics, and the like ingenious follies. When a large thought is successfully squeezed into it, it reminds us irresistibly of a big head which has worked and wriggled its way into a narrow nightcap; and when a small thought is infused into it, it becomes almost invisible in the dilution.

We come next to that delightful class of Milton's poems, which we call pastorals, namely, "Arcades," "L'Allegro," and Il Penseroso." They breathe the sweetest spirit of English landscape. They are composed of every-day life, but of every-day life shown under a certain soft ideal strangeness, like a picture or a prospect, through which you look by inverting your head. Your wonder is, how he can thus elevate the tame beauties of English scenery, which are so tiny that they might be fitly tenanted by Lilliputians,

and through which men stalk like monstrous giants. L'Allegro is an enumeration of agreeable images and objects, pictured each by a single touch, and set to a light easy measure, which might accompany the blithe song of the milkmaid, and the sharp whetting of the mower's scythe. "Il Penseroso" is essentially the same scenery, shown as if in soft and pensive moonlight. Both, need we say, are exquisitely beautiful; but we think the object would have been better gained, could two poets, of different temperaments, have, in the manner of Virgil's shepherds, exchanged their strains of joy and pensiveness in alternate verses, or if Milton had personated both in this way. As the poems are, it is too obviously one mind describing its own peculiar sources of gratification in different moods. A modern poet might now, if he had genius enough, effect what we mean, by describing a contest between Horace and Dante, or Moore and Byron-the one singing the pleasures of pleasure, the other the darker delights which mingle even with misery, like strange, scattered, bewildered flowers, growing on the haggard rocks of hell!

An acute critic, in an Edinburgh periodical, has undertaken the defence of "The Town" versus "The Country" as the source of poetry-has called us, among others, to account for preferring the latter to the former-and has ventured to assert that, cæteris paribus, a poet residing in the town will describe rural scenery better than one living constantly in the country, and adduces Milton in proof. We admit, indeed, that there will be more freshness in the feeling of the Cockney, let loose upon the country in spring, be he poet or porter, just as there will be more freshness in the feeling of the countryman entering London for the first time, and gaping with unbounded wonder at every sign, and shop, and shopkeeper he sees. But we maintain, that those always write best on any subject who are best acquainted with it, who know it in all is shades and phases; and that such minute and personal knowlege can only be obtained by long residence in, or by frequent visits to, the country. We cannot conceive, with this writer, that the country is best seen in the town, any more than that the town is best seen in the country. Bennevis is not visible from Edinburgh any more than Edinburgh from Bennevis.

We can never compare the beggarly bit of blue sky seen from a corner of Goosedubs, Glasgow, with the "dread magnificence of heaven" broadly bending over Benlomond; nor the puddles running down the Wellgate of Dundee, after a night of rain, with the red roaring torrents from the hills, which meet at the sweet village of Comrie. And even the rainbow, when you see it at the end of a dirty street, loses caste, though not color, and can hardly pass for a relation to that arch of God, which seems erected by the hands of angels, for the passage of the Divine footsteps between the ridges which confine the valley of Glencoe. And among our greatest descriptive poets, how many have resided in the country, either all their lives, or at least in their youth! Think of Virgil and Mantua, of Thomson and Ednam, of Burns and Mossgiel, of Shelley and Marlowe, of Byron and Lochnagar, of Coleridge and Nether Stowey, of Wilson and Elleray, of Scott and Abbotsford, of Wordsworth and Rydal Mount, and of Milton and Horton, where, assuredly, his finest rural pieces were composed and say with Cowper, the Cowper of Olney, as we have said with him already"God made the country, and man made the town."

We pass to two pieces, which, though belonging to different styles of poetry, class themselves together by two circumstances their similar length, and their surpassing excellence -the one being an elegy, and the other a hymn. The elegy is "Lycidas"—the hymn is on the "Nativity of Christ." To say that "Lycidas" is beautiful, is to say that a star or rose is beautiful. Conceive the finest and purest graces of the Pagan mythology culled and mingled, with modest yet daring hand, among the roses of Sharon and the lilies of the valley-conceive the waters of Castalia sprinkled on the flowers which grow in the garden of God-and you have a faint conception of what "Lycidas" means to do. Stern but short-sighted critics have objected to this as an unhallowed junction. Milton knew better than his judges. He felt that, in the millennial field of poetry, the wolf and the lamb might lie down together; that every thing at least that was beautiful might enter here. The Pagan mythology possessed this pass-word, and was admitted; and here truth and beauty accordingly met, and embraced each other. A museum he felt, had not the severe laws of a temple. There, whatever