* * * * * Poetical powers "are the inspired gift of God rarely bestowed ... in every nation, and are of power, beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public civility, to allay the perturbation of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church; to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God's true worship." * * * * * So he had written in 1642, and this lofty faith in his calling supported him twenty years later, in the arduous labour of his attempt to realise his own ideal. In setting himself down to compose _Paradise Lost_ and _Regained_, he regarded himself not as an author, but as a medium, the mouthpiece of "that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and all knowledge: Urania, heavenly muse," visits him nightly, And dictates to me Blumb'ring, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse. _Paradise Lost_, ix. 24. Urania bestows the flowing words and musical sweetness; to God's Spirit he looks to Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight. _Paradise Lost,/i>, iii, 50. The singers with whom he would fain equal himself are not Dante, or Tasso, or, as Dryden would have it, Spenser, but Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides, And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old. As he in equalled with these in misfortune--loss of sight--he would emulate them in function. Orpheus and Musaeus are the poets he would fain have as the companions of his midnight meditation (_Penseroso_). And the function of the poet is like that of the prophet in the old dispensation, not to invent, but to utter. It is God's truth which passes His lips--lips hallowed by the touch of sacred fire. He is the passive instrument through whom flows the emanation from on high; His words are not his own, but a suggestion. Even for style Milton is indebted to his "celestial patroness who deigns her nightly visitation unimplor'd."