wulf, in his "Christ," "Andreas," and "Elene," and in Longfellow's "The Divine Tragedy," "The Golden Legend," and "The New England Tragedies." Milton's trilogy consists of his poems "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," "The Circumcision," and "The Passion," the first of these being by far the most notable and beautiful of the three, and the first great poem of Milton. It is to this poem that he alludes in writing to his Italian friend, Diodati, as he says:

"We are engaged in singing the heavenly birth of the King of Peace and the happy age promised by the holy books. This is the gift we have presented to Christ's natal day. On that very morning, at daybreak, it was first conceived."

The prologue, as beautiful as the hymn itself, opens:

This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King,
Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,

Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,

That he our deadly forfeit should release,

And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

The poem proper, "The Hymn," opens with a different stanza:

It was the winter wild

While the heaven-born child

All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.

The thirteenth stanza is, perhaps, as fine as any, and expresses Milton's favorite doctrine of the music of the spheres:

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 consort to th' angelic symphony.

Thus it is that this great Christian bard may be said to have opened his literary and poetic life with a hymn of devout tribute to the infant Saviour, this sweet and exultant meditative keynote sounding more or less clearly through every later poem of his pen.

Passing by Milton's "Epitaphs," so called, including the memorable one on Shakespeare, and his short contemplative poems, "On Time" and "At a Solemn Music," the next reflective poem to which we are brought is, "Il Penseroso," its very title, "The Meditator," indicating its reflective character, it being in time and purpose and subject-matter the most distinctive meditative lyric that Milton wrote. As is known by all students of Milton, "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" are companion lyrics, supplementing each other, each of them written amid the beautiful and peaceful scenes of his father's home at Horton, and aiming together to set forth in fitting manner the joyous and the graver side of human life-"Heart-easing Mirth" and "divinest Melancholy," "the Goddess sage and holy"—each in turn singing its own song and teaching its own lesson. As "L'Allegro"

represents the cavalier, "Il Penseroso" represents the puritan of the day, opposed to despotism in the Church and State, committed in all conscience to the more serious purposes of life, and bent on lifting up to the view of the England of his day a higher standard of faith and morals than that which prevailed, while yet escaping, as he did, the almost equally dangerous extreme of an unnatural asceticism. After invoking "calm Peace and Quiet," "spare Fast," and "retired Leisure," he sings:

But first, and chiefest, with thee bring
The cherub Contemplation.

He invokes

the spirit of Plato to unfold

What worlds or what vast regions hold
The immortal mind, that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshly nook.

The poem from first to last is pensive, and at times plaintive making it necessary for the reader to examine every separate line of it for himself, as entering into the structure of this lyric of thoughtfulness. The closing lines are, perhaps, the choicest:

But let my due feet never fail

To walk the studious cloisters pale;
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light;
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced quire below,

In service high, and anthems clear,

As may with sweetness, through mine ear,

Dissolve me into ecstasies,

And bring all heaven before mine eyes.
And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown and mossy cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heaven doth shew,
And every herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.
These pleasures, Melancholy, give,
And I with thee will choose to live.

Of the eighteen sonnets of Milton one third, at least, are specifically reflective. Such is the first one, already cited, "On his Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three." So, the fourth, "To a Virtuous Young Lady:"

That in the prime of earliest youth

Wisely hast shunn'd the broad way and the green,
And with those few are eminently seen,

That labour up the hill of heavenly truth.

So, the ninth, an elegy. So, especially, the fifteenth sonnet, "On His Blindness: "

When I consider how my life is spent

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide.

It is in the seventeenth, on the same pathetic subject, that he laments his loss and yet would not complain :

Yet I argue not

Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate one jot

Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty's defence.

In the superb sonnet, the sixteenth, "On the Late

Massacre in Piedmont," we hear a voice to which modern Europe might well now give heed:

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints.

The last of the sonnets is an elegy," On His Deceased Wife."

We are thus brought to Milton's celebrated lyricodramatic poem, "Comus," as containing, with all its other elements, passages and pages of distinctly meditative verse on the high theme that he was discussing. Written in the same year with "Il Penseroso," and amid the quiet retreats of Horton, it has much of that deep and tender seriousness that marks the shorter lyric, while in its rich descriptions, its pastoral and idyllic beauty, its Doric diction, and its noble theme and purpose, it is next to Milton's great epic, his poetic masterpiece. Nor can its pervasive contemplative spirit surprise us when we remember that the author in composing it had his eye upon the gross excesses of the Restoration induced by the transfer of Gallic customs and morals to English shores. Just because the policy of the time was to confound all ethical distinctions Milton was eager to exalt the claims of personal and social purity over the exacting demands of the sensualism of the time. Comus and his bestial retainers must be routed by the lady and her brothers, and the triumph of true love and womanhood be secured.

The opening lines of the prologue well suggest