The flowers come, in their amazing beauty, as poetry knows and names them, not altogether after the order of nature; till the fine flight is once more recalled to earth in that second return to the sad reality of things which provides the most beautiful, and as the manuscript shows, one of the most carefully elaborated passages in the whole-- "Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. For so, to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, {131} Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world." The least critical reader, when he is told that the daffodil and amaranthus lines were once in the reverse order, that the "frail thoughts" were at first "sad," and the "shores" "floods," and above all that the "whelming tide" was once a thing so insignificant as the "humming tide," can judge for himself by what a succession of inspirations a work of consummate art is produced. There remain the sonnets, whose sufficient praise is given in an immortal line of Wordsworth, while all that a fine critic had thought or learnt about them is contained in the scholarly edition of Mark Pattison. Technically they are remarkable, like everything else of Milton's, at once for their conservatism and their originality; while their content has all his characteristic sincerity. They occupy a most important place in the history of the English sonnet, which had so far been almost entirely given up to a single theme, that of the poet's unhappy love, which had commonly little existence outside his verses. The shadowy mistresses who emulated the glories of Beatrice and Laura were even less substantial than they; and, though that could {132} not hinder great poets from making fine poetry out of them, it was fatal to the ordinary sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of overblown and insincere verbiage. From all this Milton emancipated it and, as Landor said, "gave the notes to glory." To glory and to other things; for not all his sonnets are consecrated to glory. They deal with various subjects; but each, whether its topic be his blindness, the death of his wife, or the fame of Fairfax or Cromwell, is the product of a personal experience of his own. No one can read them through without feeling that he gets from them a true knowledge of the man. At their weakest, as in that _To a Lady_, they convey, in the words of Mark Pattison, "the sense that here is a true utterance of a great soul." The rather commonplace thought and language somehow do not prevent the total effect from being impressive. He entirely fails only when he goes below the level of poetry altogether and repeats in verse the angry scurrility of his divorce pamphlets. And even there some