This ballad is truly wonderful. The picture of the gay boys coming out of school; the wrestle on the bonny green hill; the accident; the tender care of the homicide for his brother, and the brother's sympathizing fear of the results to him; the agitation as he sat in his father's chair; the creeping chill which comes over his mother's heart as, question after question, she divines with more and more terrible certainty what has happened; the boy's dread of his father's anger; the burst of remorse with which he makes his wild confession; his headlong flight; and then the terrifically powerful image, unmatched and unmatchable save in Homer and the Niebelungen, She turned hersel' right round about, And her heart burst into three -all these combine to give a splendid specimen of the peculiar power and excellence of our ancient ballad literature. Pope said that it was easy to mark the general course of English poetry: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, are the great landmarks of it. If we add the names of Pope, Cowper, Wordsworth, the list of poetic epochs is complete down to the beginning of the present generation. The dulness which I have said characterizes the whole of the fifteenth century, lasted far on into the sixteenth. The first half indeed of that century had the verse of Stephen Hawes and the rugged satire of Skelton to enliven it; but Edmund Spenser, born in 1553, is its first epoch-making name. Ten years later was born the poet of all time, William Shakespeare. This is the Elizabethan age of our literature, an astonishing and unequalled period of growth. Never again till the great French Revolution was there such a sudden blaze of majesty, of genius, and of strength. The decay of scholasticism, the downfall of the feudal power, the revival of classical literature, the discovery of America the progress of scientific invention, above all the spread of the Reformation, and the disenthralment of the national mind from the iron tyranny and superstition of the Dark Ages, combined to stimulate the intellect of men, and to thrill them with such electrical flashes of eagerness and awakenment, as to account in part for the mighty result. The soil had been broken up, and the vegetation burst forth in tropical exuberance. In that day lived Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Sidney, and Spenser, and Surrey, and Hooker, and Ben Jonson, and Raleigh-and the names of poet, and soldier, and statesman, and philosopher, formed often one garland for a single brow. In poetry, however, the name of Spenser is the earliest ; and in spite of the tediousness of longcontinued allegory, the chivalry, the sweetness, the richness, of his Faerie Queene will always win him a lofty place among the lovers of true poetry. In him too, as in all our greatest, we have a steady moral purpose. His end was, he tells us, "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline"; and Milton said of him, that " he dare be known to think our sage and serious poet Spenser a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.' But, great as Spenser was, his greatness was eclipsed by the greatest poet of that century-perhaps of any century-William Shakespeare. We cannot think of him without amazement, His works are, next to the Bible, the most precious and priceless heritage of imaginative genius. What new worlds they open to us! In one play we are in magic islands, surrounded by perilous seas, with delicate spirits singing and harping in our ears; in the next, we are sitting at the stately councilboard of kings, or listening to the roar of artillery round beleaguered cities; in another our faces are reddened by the glare of the witches' caldron upon the blasted heath; in a fourth, we watch the elves, under the yellow moonlight, dancing their ringlets to the wind. And how perfect in their kind is the splendor or the loveliness of those ever-changing scenes; whether, as in the Troilus and Cressida, Upon the ringing plains of windy Troy We drink delight of battle with our peers; or in As You Like It, we watch the wounded deer, stumbling wearily beside the rivulet under the waving boughs of the Forest of Ardennes; or in Macbeth see the "temple-haunting martlet" flitting to and fro in the " eager air" about the Castle of Inverness; or in Cymbeline take shelter under the noble Briton's cave; or in Romeo and Juliet assist at the lighted masque in the hall of the Capulets; or with Julius Cæsar stand, thronged with conspiring senators, in the Capitol of Rome. Sometimes the electric flame of the poet's genius seems to be blazing in the lightning, sometimes to be slumbering in the dewdrop. In the following pages only one or two passages have been selected from his plays-partly because they are all familiar to us as household words, but chiefly because such passages lose so incomparably when they are dissevered from their context. William Shakespeare died in 1616; in that year Milton was a child of eight years old. The genius of Milton dominates throughout the seventeenth century as that of Shakespeare in the sixteenth. It was the short and splendid period of Puritan mastery interpolated between the Shakespeare of Elizabeth and the Dryden of Charles II. Other poets indeed there were : there were Donne, and Quarles, and George Herbert, and Crashaw, and Herrick; there were Cowley, and Marvell, and Waller; and a crowd of Cavalier poets before the Revolution and after the Restoration. Side by side with these, “with his garland and singing robes about him," stands the solitary sublime form of John Milton, perhaps the very noblest of England's sons. Shakespeare was a more myriad-minded genius, but Milton was the rarer and the lordlier soul. It may be his literary imperfection, but assuredly it is his moral strength, that Milton could not have conceived such a character as Falstaff. For that "foul gray-haired iniquity" he would have had no bursts of inextinguishable laughter, nor any other words than those of King Henry V.: "I know thee not, old man fall to thy prayers. A modern writer has imagined Milton appearing at the Mermaid Tavern, a pure beautiful youth, and, in answer to some burst of witty ribaldry, casting among the company that grand theory of his, "that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem-that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honorablest things." "What a blush would have mounted on the old face of Ben Jonson before such a rebuke! what interruption of the jollity! what mingled uneasiness and resentment! -what forced laughter to conceal consternation! Only Shakespeare, one thinks, would have turned on the bold youth a mild and approving eye, would have looked round the room to observe the whole scene; and remembering, perhaps, some passages in his own life, would, mayhap, have had his own thoughts." But the days of Milton's manhood were cast among men infinitely more degraded than the Elizabethan wits; and among the rhymesters of the Restoration he stands out like a being of another sphere. In the darkest days of English history, amid the loudest dissonance of Bacchus and his revellers, in days which, as Macaulay says, cannot be recalled without a blush, "the days of servitude without loyalty, and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave" ;-in those days, blind, detested, impoverished, deserted, Milton with voice unchanged, To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days, In darkness, and with dangers compassed round still "gazed on the bright countenance of Truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies," and gave to the world, in Paradise Lost, the imperishable memorial of a lofty soul. Dryden and Milton were contemporaries for more than forty years; but while Dryden was adding by numerous plays and prologues to the corruption of the stage, Milton was speaking in a voice which has been compared to the swell of the advancing tide, settling into the long thunder of billows, breaking for leagues along the shore. While the gay creatures who fluttered in the brief sunshine of a licentious prosperity were grating upon their "scrannel pipes" their "lean and flashy songs," he was asserting Eternal Providence, and justifying the ways of God to man. There is no need to apologize for the length of the extracts from the grand austere Puritan, who took his inspiration not "from the heat of youth and the vapors of wine," not even "by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren daughters," but "by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and all knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he will." The next poets who mark an epoch in English literature are Dryden and Pope. Dryden died in the year 1700 (and here let me remark, in passing, that three of our greatest poets died in the first year of a century-Chaucer in 1400, Dryden in 1700, Cowper in 1800). It is the merit of Dryden to have brought into perfection the heroic couplet; and this is what Gray alludes to when he says— Behold, where Dryden's less presumptuous car Wide o'er the fields of glory bear Two coursers of ethereal race, With necks in thunder clothed, and long-resounding pace. That Dryden was a great poet is undeniable; that he desecrated his high powers and burned them, like the incense of Israel, in unhallowed shrines, is no less certain. Happily, poetry like most of his, "prurient yet passionless," is also ephemeral. He was well aware of he was even deeply penitent for—the polluting the vestal flames of genius by kindling them on the altar of base passions; and in some of his own noblest lines he says— sin he had committed in thus |