Under a plantain; yet methought less fair, Less winning soft, less amiably mild, Than that smooth watery image: back I turn'd; Whom fly'st thou? whom thou fly'st of him thou art, His flesh, his bone: to give thee being I lent, Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart, Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim So spake our general mother, and with eyes Smil'd with superior love, as Jupiter On Juno smiles; when he impregns the clouds ADAM'S MORNING PRAYER. These are thy glorious works, Parent of good, Thus wondrous fair; thyself how wondrous then! To us invisible, or dimly seen In these thy lowest works; yet these declare If better thou belong not to the dawn, Sure pledge of day; that crown'st the smiling morn, In mystic dance not without song, resound His praise, who out of darkness call'd up light. Of nature's womb, that in quaternian run And nourish all things; let your ceaseless change His praise, ye winds! that from four quarters blow, That singing up to Heaven gate ascend, Bear on your wings and in your notes His praise. To hill, or valley, fountain or fresh shade, Adam bow'd low; he kingly, from his state 'Adam, Heaven's high behest no preface needs: Sufficient that thy pray'rs are heard, and death Then due by sentence when thou didst transgress, Defeated of his seizure many days, Giv'n thee of grace, wherein thou may'st repent, Permits not; to remove thee I am come, * Yet all had heard, with audible lament 'O unexpected stroke; worse than of death! My early visitation, and my last At even, which I bred up with tender hand With what to sight or smell was sweet, from thee Into a lower world, to this obscure And wild? how shall we breathe in other air Whom thus the Angel interrupted mild:- Of sorrow, and dejection, and despair Recess, and only consolation left Nor knowing us, nor known: and if by prayer To weary him with my assiduous cries: But prayer against his absolute decree No more avails than breath against the wind, Blown stifling back on him that breathes it forth: Therefore to his great bidding I submit Th' Archangel stood, and from the other hill Gliding meteorous, as evening mist Ris'n from a river o'er the marish glides, And gathers ground fast at the lab'rer's heel We forbear to prolong these extracts by the introduction of any passages from Milton's Sonnets, Lycidas, Paradise Regained, or Sampson Agonistes: not that suitable ones might not from these poems with great felicity be drawn, but because we feel confident that our estimation, exalted as it is. of his genius, is abundantly sustained by the passages already introduced from his other works. We shall, therefore, close this extended, though we hope, not tedious lecture, by a very brief notice of him as a writer in prose. Though, as an author, Milton's celebrity rests mainly upon his poetry, yet in prose his style is lofty, clear, vigorous, expressive, and frequently adorned with profuse and glowing imagery. Like that of many other productions of the age, it is, however, deficient in simplicity and smoothness; which is doubtless attributable to his fondness for the Latin idiom in the construction of his sentences. Yet a recent critic in the Edinburgh Review remarks, that 'it is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should, in our time, be so little read. As compositions, they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language. They abound with passages, compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of Paradise Lost has he ever risen higher, than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own majestic language, 'a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.' Milton's principal works in prose are the History of England, already alluded to, A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, A Tractate of Education, A Treatise on Christian Doctrine, Three Tracts on Divorce, and the Areopagitica. Our time will not, however, permit us longer to linger with this interesting author: we shall therefore close our present remarks with the following extract, entitled his Literary Musings, as it shadows forth his Divine Poem, 'Paradise Lost.' LITERARY MUSINGS.] After I had, from my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father, whom God recompense, been exercised to the tongues, and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers, both at home and at the schools, it was found that whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of my own choice in English, or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly the latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live. But much latelier, in the private academies of Italy, whither I was favoured to resort, perceiving that some trifles which I had in memory, composed at under twenty or thereabout (for the manner is, that every one must give some proof of his wit and reading there), met with acceptance above what was looked for; and other things which I had shifted, in scarcity of books and conveniences, to patch up among them, were received with written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps, I began thus far to assent both to them and divers of my friends here at home; and not less to an inward prompting, which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined to the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written, to after-times, as they should not willingly let it die. These thoughts at once possessed me, and these other, that if I were certain to write as men buy leases, for three lives and downward, there ought no regard be sooner had than to God's glory, by the honour and instruction of my country. For which cause, and not only for that I knew it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among the Latins, I applied myself to that resolution which Ariosto followed against the persuasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end, that were a toilsome vanity; bnt to be an interpreter, and relater of the best and safest things among mine own citizens, throughout this island, in the mother dialect. That what the greatest and choicest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I in my proportion, with this over and above, of being a Christian, might do for mine, not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content with these British islands as my world, whose fortune hath hitherto been, that if the Athenians, as some say, made their small deeds great and renowned by their eloquent writers, England hath had her noble achievements made small by the unskillful handling of monks and mechanics. Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse, to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting. Whether that epic form, whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model; or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be followed, which in them that know art and use judgment, is no transgression, but an enriching of art. And lastly, what king or knight before the conquest might be chosen, in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero. And as Tasso gave to a prince of Italy his choice, whether he would command him to write of Godfrey's expedition against the infidels, or Belisarius against the Goths, or Charlemagne against the Lombards, if to the instinct of nature and the emboldening of art aught may be trusted, and that there be nothing adverse in our climate, or the fate of this age, it haply would be no rashness, from an equal diligence and inclination, to present the like offer in our own ancient |