On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English poetry: the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity. Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it. Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Horton he wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elizabethan court masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales. Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe, with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of chastity and temperance. _Lycidas_, in like manner, was the perfection of the Elizabethan pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a volume of memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge friend of Milton's, who was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637. In one stern strain, which is put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author "foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then at their height." But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once and smite no more. This was Milton's last utterance in English verse before the outbreak of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle. In technical quality _Lycidas_ is the most wonderful of all Milton's poems. The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and packed language, with its fullness of meaning and allusion, make it worthy of the minutest study. In these early poems, Milton, merely as a poet, is at his best. Something of the Elizabethan style still clings to them; but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their originality in epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton's own. His English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas's _La Semaine_, but nothing of Spenser's prolixity, or Fletcher's effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found in Milton's pure, energetic diction. He inherited their beauties, but his taste had been tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry. He was the last of the Elizabethans, and his style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new. In masque, elegy, and sonnet he set the seal to the Elizabethan poetry, said the last word, and closed one great literary era.