matchless creations of Shakspeare, and the "magnificent sphereharmonies" of MILTON. The latter, indeed, as it has been beautifully expressed, like the nightingale, sang his sublime song in the night for not only was he deprived of the glad light of day, but the dark clouds of sorrow cast their added shadows on his pathway. Yet this noble man stood erect in his integrity and exemplary in his patience, amidst all adverse circumstances. Beautifully has he been likened to the bird of Paradise, which, flying against the wind, best displays the splendour of its golden plumage; so the bard of Paradise, in his sublime excursions amid the beings of light, bursts upon us with a more supernal grandeur, as he emerges from the darkness with which he was environed. Gray thus refers to him, Milton did not commence the composition of his grand epic until he was forty-seven years of age; although he had matured its plan in his mind several years before. When he visited the Continent, he met Galileo, then a prisoner of the Inquisition: he also became acquainted with Hugo Grotius. It is a curious fact, that Grotius had then written a tragedy of which the leading subject was the Fall of Man; and Milton's epic was formed out of the first draught of a tragedy to which he had given the title of Adam Unparadised. No evidence has been adduced, however, to prove that Milton borrowed his design from Grotius; or from Du Bartas' Divine Weekes, as has been by some persons supposed. One of his earliest compositions, the Hymn to the Nativity, was written when he was but twenty-one years old; yet it has been pronounced by critics as unsurpassed by any production of its class since the age of Pindar. Here is a splendid stanza : No war, or battle's sound, was heard the world around ; The idle spear and shield were high uphung; The hooked chariot stood unstain'd with hostile blood; The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng; And kings sat still with awful eye, As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was by. How fine is that passage referring to the silencing of the heathen oracles : The oracles are dumb; no voice or hideous hum Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. The village of Horton is associated with the earlier portion of the poet's life; it was there that he wrote his Comus, Lycidas, and Il Penseroso. At Chalfont St. Giles he wrote his great epic. Fuseli thought the second book of Paradise Lost the grandest effort of the human mind we possess. How splendid is his Invocation to Lighthow touchingly it closes!— Thus with the year Seasons return; but not to me returns Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men Of nature's works, to me expunged and razed, According to Sir Egerton Brydges, Milton's sonnet on his loss of sight, is unequalled by any composition of its class in the language: When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, That murmur, soon replies-" God doth not need And post o'er land and ocean without rest: Il Penseroso abounds with striking passages; such as the following, to Contemplation : Come, pensive nun, devout and pure, |