tionate memorial. Though very elaborately wrought after the fashion of a pedantic age, and abounding with forced conceits and cold fancies, these verses give promise of better things, when his genius (he being then in his seventeenth year only) should arrive at maturity, and dare to speak, and write, and think, according to its own free will and choice, unfettered by any precedents of the schools or time-sanctioned authorities.

Our author's next performance (though, like the preceding, more in the style of Donne and Cowley than the genuine vein of John Milton) was a splendid ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, in a graceful lyric measure. A recitative of four stanzas forms a fine preamble to the Hymn. After proposing his theme, the poet thus earnestly exhorts his Muse to run to Bethlehem and hail the advent of the Redeemer before the wise men from the east could reach "the place where the young child lay:"

"See how from far, upon the eastern road,

The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet:
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,

And lay it lowly at his blessed feet:

Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet;

And join thy voice unto the angel-quire,

From out his secret altar, touch'd with hallow'd fire."

This Muse was surely his own "Urania" (not one of the fabled Nine,) and here she tried her youthful voice in a prelude worthy of that adventurous song of Paradise, when, many a year of after-troubles past, she rose from warbling her humble Christmas-carol, to swell the hallelujahs of heaven, and the hosannas of earth, while she "with angels did divide to sing." The multitude of the heavenly host which appeared to the shepherds in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night, are thus gloriously presented:

"At last surrounds their sight
A globe of circular light,

That with long beams the shame-faced night array'd;
The helmed cherubim,

And sworded seraphim,

Are seen in glittering ranks with wings display'd,
Harping, in loud and solemn quire,

With unexpressive notes, to Heaven's new-born heir.

"Such music, as 'tis said,

Before was never made.

But when of old the sons of morning sung;
While the Creator great

His constellations set,

And the well-balanced world on hinges hung,
And cast the dark foundations deep,

And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.

Ring out, ye crystal spheres!

Once bless our human ears

(If ye have power to touch our senses so,)

And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time;

And let the base of Heaven's deep organ blow,
And, with your ninefold harmony,

Make up full concert to the angelic symphony."

The sections of this ode, on the portentous tradition that certain heathen oracles were silenced after the birth of Christ, have been universally admired. Recording the terror and consternation of the expelled idols fleeing from their shrines, we have sketches, brief but masterly, of the principal peers of Satan's Pandemonium, which may well be compared with the finished portraits of the same infernal personages in the first and second books of Paradise Lost.

A fragment, On the Passion of our Saviour, probably attempted in the same year with the foregoing, shows that the writer had not yet disenthralled himself from the bondage of bad Italian and worse English examples in style. Witness the following stanza :

"Befriend me, Night! best patroness of grief,
Over the pole thy thickest mantle throw,
And work my flatter'd fancy to belief,

That heaven and earth are colour'd with my woe;
My sorrows are too dark for day to know:

The leaves should all be black whereon I write,
And letters where my tears have wash'd a wannish white."

Were ever tears shed, either in writing or reading such frigid lines as these? If they sprang into the eye, they would freeze before they fell; but, hark!—the next stanza! and you will say, "that strain was of a higher mood."

“See, see the chariot and those rushing wheels,
That whirl'd the prophet up at Chebar flood;
My spirit some transporting cherub feels;

To bear me where the towers of Salem stood,

-Once glorious towers, now sunk in guiltless blood;
There doth my soul in holy vision sit,

In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatic fit!"

In Paradise Lost there is not a flight more well-begun, but here the youthful poet flagged upon the wing, and, to the relique of eight verses, is appended the following affecting note:-"This subject being above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, he left it unfinished."

The little poem (twenty-eight lines only,) At a Solemn Music, is magnificently conceived, and exquisitely finished throughout. Milton had taken extraordinary pains with this piece, of which there are extant three draughts in his own handwriting, containing seven considerable, and many minor variations, including the excision of no less. than ten lines the chippings and dust of a diamond, in the process of polishing it to perfection! Thus had he early learned the precious "art to blot ;" and resolutely he exercised it, proving, by this single example, if he had left no other, that what at first appears excellent, and is so, may

be made more excellent by not sparing even darling thoughts and beautiful, when they are rather expletive than essential.

Lycidas is a monody, in which the author bewails the death of a youthful friend, who had been drowned at sea. It is constructed of irregular stanzas, and, though equal in ornate diction and picturesque illustration to anything from the same pen, it is so difficult to read, even with the eye, that it is probably less perused than any other of Milton's masterpieces, though from none are a few peculiar passages more frequently quoted. Who could ever be weary of dwelling, with composure of delight verging on entrancement, on such lines as close this noble rhapsody:Weep no more, woeful shepherds! weep no more,

For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed,

And yet anon repairs his drooping head,

And tricks his beams, and, with new-spangled ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:

-So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high,

Through the dear might of Him that walk'd the waves;
Where other groves and other streams along,
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,
And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love.
There entertain him all the saints above,
In solemn troops and sweet societies,
That sing, and, singing, in their glory move,
And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes."

The contrasted poems of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, the cheerful and the thoughtful man, are unrivalled in their kind, and as perfect as counterpart descriptions can be of natural scenery, artificial structures, and human feelings, under the influence of seasons and circumstances, abroad and at home, by day and by night, which affect different minds differently, or the same mind differently in different moods, through the medium of the

bodily senses. While the landscapes furnish delectable subjects for the pencil of the painter, the images, allegorical as well as real, are so happily fitted for the chisel of the sculptor, that, were it the taste of those who erect stately mansions in our days, to adorn them with "cornice or frieze, with bossy sculpture graven," as temples and palaces were of old, the series of figures and groups in each of these models of diversified excellence would want only the hand of a Canova or a Chantrey, inspired by the Euphrosyne of the bard himself in the one case, and his "pensive Nun, devout and pure," in the other, to put the poetry of Milton into marble, and give the marble more than life by making it rival the song in endurance as well as in beauty and sublimity. Music, the music of Handel, the Milton of that sister art, which, next to his own, the poet himself loved best, has already been "married to (the) immortal verse" of these harmonious twins. Illustrative of one remarkable feature of our author's genius, a passage from each of these, disclosing his enthusiastic passion for "the concord of sweet sounds," may, in this place, be opportunely quoted, out of numerous allusions to the subject occurring in all his writings. Here are exemplified the different kinds of music, and their respective influences on the merry and the meditative man.

And ever against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse,

Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
In notes, with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains that tie

The hidden soul of harmony;

That Orpheus' self may heave his head,

From golden slumbers on a bed