years, amid his incessant study of the Greek and Latin poets, and other self-improvement, his heart was perhaps more open than at any other time to the rural beauty which lay around him. “Comus” and “Lycidas” both contain fine natural imagery, yet somewhat deflected by the artistic framework in which it is set. In the latter poem, in which Milton, adapting the idyllic form of Virgil, fills it with a mightier power, classical allusion and mythology are strangely, yet not unharmoniously, blended with pictures taken from English landscape. Every one remembers the splendid grouping of flowers which he there broiders in. Of this catalogue it has been observed that, beautiful as it is, it violates the truth of nature, as it places side by side flowers of different seasons which are never seen flowering together. It is in his two “descriptive Lyrics” that we find the clearest proofs of an eye that had observed Nature at first hand and for itself. In the poem descriptive of mirth, it has been observed that the mirth is of a very sedate kind, not reaching beyond a “trim and stately cheerfulness.” The mythological pedigrees attached both to mirth and to melancholy strike us now as somewhat strange, if not frigid; but, with this allowance, Milton’s richly sensuous imagination bodies forth the cheerfulness, as he wished to portray it, in a succession of images unsurpassed for beauty. In the lines descriptive of these images, Art and Nature appear perhaps more than in any other of Milton’s poems in perfect equipoise. The images selected are the aptest vehicles of the sentiment; the language in which they are expressed is of the most graceful and musical; while the natural objects themselves are seen at first hand, set down with their edges still sharp, and uncolored by any tinge of bookish allusion. Aspects of English scenery, one after another, occur, which he was the first poet to note, and which none since could dare to touch, so entirely has he made them his own. The mower whetting his scythe,—who ever hears that sound coming from the lawn in the morning without thinking of Milton? “The tanned haycock in the mead;” the cottage chimney smoking betwixt two aged oaks; the moon “As if her head she bowed, Stooping through a fleecy cloud;” the shower pattering “On the ruffling leaves, With minute drops from off the eaves;” the great curfew-bell heard swinging “over some wide watered shore;”—these are all images taken straight from English landscape which Milton has forever enshrined in his two matchless poems.