When we pass from the images of Nature that abound in Chaucer and in Shakespeare to those which Milton furnishes, the transition is much the same as when we pass from the scenery of Homer to that of Virgil. The contrast is that between natural free-flowing poetry, in which the beauty is child-like and unconscious, and highly cultured artistic poetry, which produces its effects through a medium of learned illustration, ornate coloring, and stately diction. In the one case Nature is seen directly and at first hand, with nothing between the poet and the object except the imaginative emotion under which he works. In the other, Nature is apprehended only in her “second intention,” as logicians speak, only as she appears through a beautiful haze, compounded of learning, associations of the past, and carefully selected artistic colors. With Milton, Nature was not his first love, but held only a secondary place in his affections. He was in the first place a scholar, a man of letters, with the theologian and polemic latent in him. A lover of all artistic beauty he was, no doubt, and of Nature mainly as it lends itself to this perception. And as is his mode of apprehending Nature, such is the language in which he describes her. When he reached his full maturity he had framed for himself out of the richness of his genius and the resources of his learning a style elaborate and splendid, so that he stands unique among English poets, “our one first-rate master in the grand style.” As an eminent living French writer says,—“For rendering things he has the unique word, the word which is a discovery,” and “he has not only the image and the word, he has the period also, the large musical phrase, somewhat laden with ornaments and intricate with inversions, but bearing all along with it in its superb undulation. Above all, he has something indescribably serene and victorious, an unfailing level of style, power indomitable.” This admirable description of M. Scherer applies mainly to Milton’s style, as it was fully elaborated in his great epic. And the thought has sometimes occurred, whether this magnificently elaborated style can be a fit vehicle for rendering truly the simplicity, the refreshingness of Nature,—whether the poet’s art, from its very opulence, must not color too much the clearness and transparency of the external world. However this may be, it is certain that it is not to his maturer poems, with their grandeur of style, that we look for his most vivid renderings of scenery, but to those early poems, which had more native grace of diction and less of artistic elaboration. Nowhere has Milton shown such an eye for scenery as in those first poems, “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Lycidas,” and “Comus,” composed before he was thirty, just after leaving Cambridge, while he was living under his father’s roof at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. During the five years of country life, the most genial of all his