"perhaps the finest in the English language," represent a marked growth of poetic power and an exceptional accomplishment for a poet just turned twenty-one. He thought enough of it to give an excellent description of it to his friend Diodati in his sixth Latin elegy; indeed the original hardly anywhere rises above two splendid lines of the paraphrase :

"Stelliparumque polum, modulantesque æthere turmas Et subito elisos ad sua fana deos." 1

As we shall see from the fragment on the "Passion," Milton was meditating upon the great events of the Christian Year and endeavoring to give them poetic expression of an adequate kind. He succeeded so well at his first attempt that he may almost be said to have imposed the thought of his ode and himself upon most reading people whenever the glad festival comes round. Reverence of spirit and noble charm of style had never be

1 Loosely rendered by Cowper:

"The hymning angels and the herald-star

That led the Wise, who sought him from afar,
And idols on their own unhallow'd shore
Dash'd, at his birth to be revered no more."

fore been so harmonized in an English religious poem, nor have they, perhaps, been so harmonized since. The poet was rapt away on the wings of his imagination, but not carried so far out of sight as in much of his later work; hence his ode is one of the most comprehensible of his poems for the normal

reader.

Whether, indeed, it deserves Hallam's high praise is another matter. It has action, but not the dramatic intensity of Dryden's "Alexander's Feast"; it has nobility of thought and feeling, but not the nobility of the best stanzas of Wordsworth's "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." Besides, being a regular ode in set stanzas, it did not allow Milton to attain the full harmonic effects of the more or less irregular ode, in which sound is married to sense in a manner unparalleled in any other form of lyric. Yet, if it be not the greatest English ode, it surely deserves more attention than Mark Pattison gave it, not to mention the purblind Johnson. There are crudities to be discovered in it beyond doubt; there are indications of a slight bending toward the

F

Fantastic School of Donne; but these are trifles compared with the charm and power that result from the blending of Greek and Hebrew elements with the almost magical effects of the skilfully chosen proper names— with the pervading dignity of style and the individual mastery of rhythm.

With regard to the last point it will be well to go somewhat into particulars. Not only is the rhythm of such a stanza as that beginning

"Such music (as 'tis said)"

masterly and original, but the stanzaic form itself is the invention of a metrical artist. Its elements are not new, being merely a "tailstave" and a couplet; but the proportions observed by the various lines with respect to the number of contained syllables are strikingly unique. The short lines of five or six syllables are balanced against lines of ten, and when one expects a uniform couplet, one is confronted with a line of eight syllables rhyming with an Alexandrine of twelve. Hence the resulting stanza gives swiftness of

movement through its short lines, abundance of melody through its frequent rhymes, and a stately dignity through its protracted and sonorous close. What finer combination of melody and harmony could one desire than this:

"The lonely mountains o'er,

And the resounding shore,

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent;

With flower-inwoven tresses torn

The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn."

The alliteration discoverable here and elsewhere has induced some critics to find the ode too artificial, just as the twenty-sixth stanza about "the sun in bed," introducing a figure more suitable to Donne, or, with a slight change, to Butler, has induced them to discover a hankering in the young poet after the diseased beauties of Marinism; but these are trifles when compared with the splendid rhythmical and metrical triumph of the

"Hymn" proper, or with the marvellous diction exhibited in such verses as

"And cast the dark foundations deep,

And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep."

With regard to the four admirable preliminary stanzas, Milton can claim no such metrical originality as he can for the stanzas of his "Hymn.” They are precisely the stanzas used in the elegy on the "Fair Infant," and are a mere modification of the rhyme-royal of Chaucer, the seventh verse containing twelve syllables instead of ten, i.e. being an Alexandrine. This modification had been consciously or unconsciously made by Sir Thomas More, in his “Lamentation" for Queen Elizabeth, wife of Henry VII., but Phineas Fletcher was more probably the source that influenced Milton. He might easily have developed it for himself, however, since modifications of stanzas by the addition of an Alexandrine in imitation of Spenser were frequent at the time. But such noble use of any sort of stanza as that made by Milton was not common then, and never has been or will be.