From one point of view his best was nothing: from the other, more than equally true, the humblest line that had come from his pen had received a passport to immortality. What does the famous volume contain? It opens with the noble _Ode on the Nativity_, as if to give the discerning reader invincible proof in the first twenty lines put before him that the proud words of the publisher's preface were amply justified. "Let the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote; whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated as sweetly excelled. Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their worth, I am not fearful to expose them to thy exactest perusal." So the preface ends: and then what follows is-- "This is the month, and this the happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King, {94} 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." _Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo_. No one had ever written such English verse as this before: no one ever would again. Here was a poet, writing at the age of twenty-one, for whom it was evident that no theme could be so high that he could not find it fit utterance. Fit and also peculiar to himself. The peculiar Miltonic note which none of his innumerable imitators have ever caught for more than a few lines, which he himself never in all his works loses for more than a moment, is instantly struck. As Mr. Mackail has said, "there is not a square inch of his poetry from first to last of which one could not confidently say, 'This is Milton and no one else.'" One may even go further than Mr. Mackail. For he seems to make an exception where certainly none is needed. He is justly insisting that one of the most remarkable things about Milton is that, while English poetry spoke one language in his youth and another in his age, he himself spoke neither. His "accent and speech" alike in _Lycidas_ and in _Paradise Lost_ {95} are his own, and in marked contrast to those of contemporary poets. But here Mr. Mackail adds the qualification "if we exclude a few slight juvenile pieces of his boyhood and those metrical versions of the Psalms in which he elected not to be a poet." He asserts, that is, that neither in the Psalms nor in the "juvenile pieces" is Milton characteristically himself and that in the Psalms he is not a poet at all. And no one will care to deny that many of the versions of the Psalms have little Milton and less poetry in them. But is this true of all? And in particular is it true of the paraphrase of Psalm cxxxvi. which, with its companion version of Psalm cxiv. is the most "juvenile" of all? A boy of fifteen has not usually much power of "electing" to be or not to be a poet.