"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call Earth." So here at once, in his first important poem, what in other hands might have been a mere telling of the old human and earthly story of the first Christmas night becomes in Milton's a vision of all time and all space, with heaven in it, and the stars, and the music of the spheres, and the great timeless scheme of redemption with which he was to have so much to do later, with history, too, and literature, the false gods of the Old Testament and of the Greek and Roman classics already {101} anticipating the parts they were to play in _Paradise Lost_. And note one other thing. Milton is only twenty-one, but he is already an incomparable artist. The stanza had been so far the usual form for lyrics, and he adopts it here for the first and last time. But if he accepts the instrument prescribed by tradition, with what a master's hand this wonderful boy of twenty-one touches it, and to what astonishing music! It seems that the stanza itself is his own. Every one has felt the combination in it, as he manages it, of the romantic movement and suggestion which he loved and renounced with the classical strength which is the chief element in the final impression he made on English poetry. As yet the romantic quality is the stronger, and even one of the mighty closing Alexandrines is dedicated to the lovely Elizabethan fancy of the "yellow skirted fayes" who "Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze." How such a line as that, or still more plainly the two which end the most romantic stanza of all-- "No nightly trance, or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell" {102} found a rejoicing echo in Keats is obvious. This, of course, has often been noticed. But has it ever been remarked that there are also lines in the poem which might have been written by another nineteenth-century poet of equal but very different genius? "The winds, with wonder whist, Smoothly the waters kissed, Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean;"-- should we be surprised to come upon these elemental loves and joys heralding a new reign of justice and peace in the _Prometheus Unbound_? But neither Keats nor Shelley, who both had their affinities to Milton, had it in him to reach the concentrated Miltonic energy of such lines as-- "The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep," or-- "Than his bright throne or burning axletree could bear." Almost every one of these final Alexandrines, it is to be observed, sums up the note of its stanza in a chord of majestic power. They are the most Miltonic lines in the poem; for it is precisely "majesty" {103} which is the unique and essential Miltonic quality; and Dryden in the famous epigram ought to have kept it for him and not given it to Virgil, though by doing so he would have made his splendid compliment impossible.