was curious, interesting, or rare, might be admitted. Pan's pipe might lean upon the foot of the true cross- -Apollo's flute and David's lyre stand side by side-and the thunderbolts of Jove rest peacefully near the fiery chariot of Elijah.

But what shall we say of his hymn? Out of the Hebrew Scriptures, it is (besides his own "Hymn of our First Parents," and Coleridge's "Hymn to Mont Blanc") the only one we remember worthy of the name. When you compare the ordinary swarm of church hymns to this, you begin to doubt whether the piety which prompted the one, and the piety which prompted the other, were of the same qualitywhether they agreed in any thing but the name. We have here no trash, as profane as it is fulsome, about "sweet Jesus! dear Jesus!" no effusions of pious sentimentalism, like certain herbs, too sweet to be wholesome; but a strain which might have been sung by the angelic host on the plains of Bethlehem, and rehearsed by the shepherds in the ears of the Infant God. Like a belated member of that deputation of Sages who came from the East to the manger at Bethlehem, does he spread out his treasures, and they are richer than frankincense, sweeter than myrrh, and more precious than gold. With awful reverence and joy, he turns aside to behold this great sight-the Eternal God dwelling in an infant! Here the fault (if fault it be) with which "Lycidas" has been charged is sternly avoided. From the Stable he repulses the heathen deities, feeling that the ground is holy. And yet, methinks, Apollo would have desired to stay-would have lingered to the last moment to hear execrations so sublime

"The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arch'd roof in words, deceiving
Apollo from his shrine,

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.
He feels from Judah's land

The dreadful Infant's hand:

The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne.
Nor all the gods beside

Dare longer now abide,

Nor Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine:

Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,

Can, in his swaddling bands, control the damned crew." "Samson Agonistes" is perhaps the least poetical, but certainly by no means the least characteristic of his works. In style and imagery, it is bare as a skeleton, but you see it to be the skeleton of a Samson. It is the purest piece of literary sculpture in any language. It stands before you, like a statue, bloodless and blind. There can be no doubt that Milton chose Samson as a subject, from the resemblance in their destinies. Samson, like himself, was made blind in the cause of his country; and through him, as through a new channel, does Milton pour out his old complaint, but more here in anger than in sorrow. It had required-as the Nile had seven mouths-so many vents to a grief so great and absolute as his. Consolation Samson has little, save in the prospect of vengeance, for the prospect of the resurrectionbody had not fully dawned on his soul. He is, in short, a hard and Hebrew shape of Milton. Indeed, the poem might have been written by one who had been born blind, from its sparing natural imagery. He seems to spurn that bright and flowery world which has been shut against him, and to create, within his darkened tabernacle, a scenery and a companionship of his own, distinct as the scenery and the companionship of dreams. It is, consequently, a naked and gloomy poem; and as its hero triumphs in death, so it seems to fall upon and crush its reader into prostrate wonder, rather than to create warm and willing admiration. You believe it to be a powerful poem, and you tremble as you believe.

What a contrast in "Comus," the growth and bloom rather than the work of his youth! It bears the relation to the other works of Milton, that "Romeo and Juliet" does to the other works of Shakspeare. We can conceive it the effluence of his first love. He here lets his genius run riot with him" in the colors of the rainbow live, and play i' the plighted clouds." It is rather a dream than a dramasuch a dream as might have been passing across the fine features of the young Milton, as he lay asleep in Italy. It is an exercise of fancy, more than of imagination. And if our readers wish us, ere going farther, to distinguish fancy from imagination, we would do so briefly, as follows:-They

are not, we maintain, essentially different, but the same power under different aspects, attitudes, and circumstances. Have they ever contemplated the fire at even-tide? then must they have noticed how the flame, after warming and completely impregnating the fuel, breaks out above it into various fantastic freaks, motions, and figures, as if, having performed its work, it were disposed to play and luxuriate a little, if not for its own delectation, for the amusement of the spectator. Behold in the evening experiences of the fire the entire history of the mind of genius. There is first the germ, or spark, or living principle, called thought, or intuition, or inspiration. That fiery particle, coming into contact with a theme, a story, with the facts of history, or the abstractions of intellect, begins to assimilate them to itself, to influence them with its own heat, or to brighten them into its own light. That is the imaginative, or shall we call it the transfiguring process by which dead matter is changed into quick flame-by which an old fabulous chronicle becomes the tragedy of "Macbeth"- -or by which some lascivious tale in an Italian novel is changed into the world-famous, and terribly-true story of "Othello, the Moor of Venice." But after this is done, does the imaginative power always stop here? No; in the mere exuberance of its strengthin the wantonness of its triumph-it will often, like the fire on the hearth, throw out gushes of superfluous but beautiful flame; in other words, images, "quips, cranks, and wreathed smiles"-and thus and here we find that glorious excrescence or luxury, which we call fancy. Fancy is that crown of rays round the sun which is seen in the valley of Chamouni, but not on the summit of Mont Blanc, where a stern and stripped stillness proclaims collected and severe power. It is the dancing spray of the waterfall, not the calm, uncrested, voluminous might of the river; or it may be compared to those blossoms on the apple-tree, which that tree pours forth in the exuberance of its spring vigor, but which never produce fruit. Imagination is the war-horse pawing for the battlefancy, the war-horse curvetting and neighing on the mead. From such notions of imagination and fancy, there follow, we think, the following conclusions:-First, that true fancy is rather an excess of a power than a power itself. Secondly, that it is generally youthful, and ready to vanish away with

the energy and excitement of youth. Thirdly, that it is incident to, though not inseparable from, the highest geniusabounding in Milton, Shakspeare, and Shelley-not to be found, however, in Homer, Dante, or Wordsworth. Fourthly, that the want of it generally arises from severity of purpose, comparative coldness of temperament, or the acquired prevalence of self-control; and, fifthly, that a counterfeit of it exists, chiefly to be known by this, that its images are not representative of great or true thoughts; that they are not original; and that, therefore, their profusion rather augurs a mechanical power of memory than a native excess of imagination. In "Comus" we find imagination, and imagination with a high purpose; but more than in any of Milton's works do we find this imagination at play, reminding us of a man whose day's work is done, and who spends his remaining strength in some light and lawful game. Our highest praise of "Comus" is, that when remembering and repeating its lines, we have sometimes paused to consider whether they were or were not Shakspeare's. They have all his mingled sweetness and strength, his careless grace or grandeur, his beauty as unconscious of itself as we could conceive a fair woman in some world where there was not even a river, or lake, or drop of water to mirror her charms. In this poem, to apply his own language, we have the "stripling cherub," all bloom, and grace, and liveliness; in the Paradise Lost" we have the "giant angel," the emblem of power and valor, and whose very beauty is grave and terrible like his strength.

"Paradise Regained" stands next in the catalogue. No poem has suffered more from comparison than this. Milton's preference of it to "Paradise Lost" has generally been quoted as an instance of the adage, that authors are the worst judges of their own works; that, like some mothers, they prefer their deformed and sickly offspring. We should think, however, that even were the work much worse than it is, Milton's liking for it might have been accounted for on the principle that authors are often fondest of their last production; like the immortal Archbishop of Granada, whom Gil Blas so mortally offended by hinting that his sermons were beginning to smell of his apoplectic fit, instead of, as a wise flatterer would have done, stretching out his praises till

they threatened to crack against the horizon. But, in truth, Milton was not so much mistaken as people suppose. There are men who at all times, and there are moods in which all men prefer the 23d Psalm to the 18th, the first Epistle of John to the Apocalypse; so there are moods in which we like the "Paradise Regained," with its profound quiet-with its Scriptural simplicity-with its insulated passages of unsurpassed power and grandeur-with its total want of effort -and with its modest avoidance of the mysterious agonies of the crucifixion, which Milton felt was a subject too sublime even for his lyre-to the more labored and crowded splendors of the "Paradise Lost." The one is a giant tossing mountains to heaven in trial of strength, and with manifest toil; the other is a giant gently putting his foot on a rock, and leaving a mark inimitable, indelible, visible to all after time. If the one remind you of the tumultuous glories and organ-tempests in the Revelation, the other reminds you of that silence which was in heaven for the space of half an hour.

The principal defect of this poem is the new and contemptible light in which it discovers the Devil. The Satan of the "Paradise Lost" had many of the elements of the heroic, and even when starting from his toad-shape, he recovers his grandeur instantly by his stature reaching the sky. But the Satan of the "Paradise Regained" is a mean, low, crawling worm-a little and limping fiend. He never looks the Saviour full in the face, but keeps nibbling at his heels. And although in this Milton has expressed the actual history of intellect and courage, when separated from virtue, happiness and hope, and degraded into the servile vassals of an infernal will, yet it is not so pleasing for us to contemplate the completed as it is the begun ruin. Around the former some rays of beauty continue to linger; the latter is desolation turned into despicable use. The Satan of the "Paradise Lost," the high, the haughty, the consciously second only to the Most High, becomes, in the "Paradise Regained," at best, a clever conjurer, whose tricks are constantly baffled, and might, as they are here described, we think, be baffled by an inferior wisdom to that of incarnate Omnipotence.

We pass to the greatest work of Milton's genius; and