worthy of man and of itself.


'Of gorgeous tragedy,
Presenting Thebes' or Pelops' line,
Or the Tale of Troy divine,
Or what, though rare, of later age,
Ennobled hath the buskin'd stage.'


No poet, perhaps, shows wider and truer sympathy with every form of
the really beautiful in art, nature, and history: and yet he was a
Puritan.

Yes, Milton was a Puritan; one who, instead of trusting himself and
his hopes of the universe to second-hand hearsays, systems, and
traditions, had looked God's Word and his own soul in the face, and
determined to act on that which he had found. And therefore it is
that to open his works at any stray page, after these effeminate
Carolists, is like falling asleep in a stifling city drawing-room,
amid Rococo French furniture, not without untidy traces of last
night's ball, and awaking in an Alpine valley, amid the scent of
sweet cyclamens and pine boughs, to the music of trickling rivulets
and shouting hunters, beneath the dark cathedral aisles of mighty
trees, and here and there, above them and beyond, the spotless peaks
of everlasting snow; while far beneath your feet -


'The hemisphere of earth, in clearest ken,
Stretched to the amplest reach of prospect, lies.'