There are times that naturally produce real, others that naturally produce imitative poetry. Tranquil, stagnating times, produce the imitative; times that rouse in man self-consciousnesses, produce the real. All great poetry has a moral foundation. It is imagination building upon the great, deep, universal, eternal human will. Therefore profound sympathy with man, and profound intelligence of man, aided by, or growing out of, that profound sympathy, is vital to the true poet. But in stagnating times both sympathy with man sleeps, and the disclosure of man sleeps. Troubled times bring out humanity--show its terrible depths--also its might and grandeur--both ways its truth. A great poet seems to require his birth in an age when there are about him great self-revelations of man, for his vaticination. Moreover, his own particular being is more deeply and strongly stirred and shown to him in such a time. But the moral tempest may be too violent for poetry--as the Civil War of the Roses appeared to blast it and all letters--that of the Parliament contrariwise. The intellect of Milton, in the _Paradise Lost_, shows that it had seen "the giant-world enraged." Happily for the literary fame of his country--for the solid exaltation in these latter ages of the sublime art which he cultivated--for the lovers of poetry who by inheritance or by acquisition speak the masculine and expressive language which he still ennobled--for the serene fame of the august poet himself--the political repose which a new change (the restoration of detruded and exiled royalty to its ancestral throne) spread over the land, by shutting up the public hopes of the civil and ecclesiastical republican in despair, and by crushing his faction in the dust, gave him back, in the visionary blindness of undecaying age, to "the still air of delightful studies," in order that, in seclusion from all "barbarous dissonance," he might achieve the work destined to him from the beginning--not less than the greatest ever achieved by man.