hood, and in the "immortal longings" of his own spirit. He gazes on a gilded cloud or a flower, and finds in them "shadows of divinity;" searching himself, he comes upon strange hints of man's Divine origin, he discovers " some rills from the Eternal source of being,

some

"With echoes beaten from the eternal hills."

To Vaughan, man's life on earth is a brief exile from that eternal existence from which he came, and to which, when he rises above his temporal limitations, he longs to return. The light of man's spirit is a spark of the Divine light:

"For each enclosed spirit is a star

Enlight'ning his own little sphere;

Whose light, though fetch'd and borrowed from far
Both mornings makes and evenings there."

The Cavalier Lyrists: Robert Herrick. Meanwhile at Court a group of aristocratic poets composed their slight but often charming love-songs to Celia or Lucasta. Their thoughts are given to the pleasures of this world as frankly as those of Vaughan and Herbert are centered on the next. ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674), a Devonshire vicar, while he shares in the mood of these light and graceful amorists, rises above them in vigor and charm, and in the fine quality of his lyrical gift. In his youth Herrick was one of those genial spirits gathered round Ben Jonson. In 1647, deprived of his living by the Puritans, he left Devonshire and returned to London. There in 1648 he published his Hesperides and Noble Numbers.

Herrick's limpid and altogether charming verse is troubled by no depth of thought or storm of passion.

The greater part of it reflects the pagan spirit of those who lie at ease in the warm sunshine; content to enjoy, they sigh that life is but a day, and lament as the lengthening shadow draws near. The closing verse of his poem, Corinna's going a-Maying, is a good example of his familiar mood; the inevitable chill of regret creeps into the sunshiny lyric of May-day, and his laughter ends in a sigh:

"Come, let us go while we are in our prime,

And take the harmless folly of the time!

We shall grow old apace, and die

Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short; and our days run
As fast away as does the sun;
And as a vapor, or a drop of rain
Once lost, can ne'er be found again:
So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade;
All love, all liking, all delight

Lies drowned with us in endless night.
Then while time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna! Come, let's go a-Maying."

There is a captivating naturalness and freshness in Herrick's note; the rural England of his time is green forever in his verse, the hedgerows are abloom, the Maypoles gay with garlands. He sings

"Of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers."

England was racked with civil war, but neither the strife of religions nor the tumults in the state are able to shatter his Arcadia; while King and Parliament are in deadly grapple, Herrick sings his dainty love-songs

to Julia and Anthea, and babbles "of green fields." Enjoy your May-day, gather rose-buds, "let's now take our time;" such were the gay songs he flung defiantly in the face of sober, Puritan England.

Herrick and Milton. In the midst of this poetry of self-indulgence there rose the mighty voice of Milton. In Lycidas, which may be said to conclude the poems of his earlier period, Milton, too, asks the pagan question, "Seeing that life is short, is it not better to enjoy?” but only to meet it with triumphant denial. This famous passage becomes of especial interest when we think that it was probably written with such poets as Herrick in mind; when we recognize in it the high seriousness and religious faith of Puritanism, squarely confronting the nation's lighter mood:

"Alas! what boots it with uncessant care

To tend the homely, slighted, shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorrèd shears,
And slits the thin-spun life. 'But not the praise,'
Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears:
'Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumour lies,
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed.”

JOHN MILTON

(1608-1674)

He died,

Who was the sire of an immortal strain,

Blind, old, and lonely, when his country's pride
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide

Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite
Of lust and blood; he went, unterrified,

Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite

Yet reigns o'er earth, the third among the sons of light."

SHELLEY.

"His sympathies with things are much narrower than Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was not polemical: Milton was polemical altogether." CARLYLE. “An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated scholarship." MARK PATTISON.

"God-gifted organ voice of England."

Milton is much more than the poet of Puritanism. His beauty-loving nature, his varied accomplishments, the course of his literary development, and his profound learning, make him the representative of a period rather than of a single sect or political party. We think of him as the author of Paradise Lost, and as the learned and eloquent defender of the Puritan cause, but we must remember that the highly serious and consecrated poet who wrote his great theological epic to "justify the ways of God to men" was in his early years a poetical disciple of Spenser, showing much of the master's sensuous delight in beauty. In Milton the Renaissance and the Reformation meet. The transition from the romantic, beauty-loving Milton, author of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, to the polemical and theological Milton, who wrote Eikonoclastes and Paradise Lost, is a single, concrete illustration of the change through which England

herself passed in the first half of the seventeenth century. Born in 1608, not ten years after the death of Spenser, when Shakespeare was still in London writing for the stage, Milton had a direct heritage from the great Elizabethans. Indeed, his work throughout has much

of that large utterance and breadth of conception, if not breadth of sympathy, which characterized the men of the preceding generation. But Milton grew up in a time noted for its erudition, and came to maturity in an England torn by the grim struggles of a civil war. His work reflects these influences also. Passing from the period of youthful dreams and poetic fancies, he