Of all Milton’s smaller poems, _Lycidas_ is the greatest favourite with us. We cannot agree to the charge which Dr. Johnson has brought against it, of pedantry and want of feeling. It is the fine emanation of classical sentiment in a youthful scholar—‘most musical, most melancholy.’ A certain tender gloom overspreads it, a wayward abstraction, a forgetfulness of his subject in the serious reflections that arise out of it. The gusts of passion come and go like the sounds of music borne on the wind. The loss of the friend whose death he laments seems to have recalled, with double force, the reality of those speculations which they had indulged together; we are transported to classic ground, and a mysterious strain steals responsive on the ear while we listen to the poet, ‘With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.’ We shall proceed to give a few passages at length in support of our opinion. The first we shall quote is as remarkable for the truth and sweetness of the natural descriptions as for the characteristic elegance of the allusions: ‘Together both, ere the high lawns appear’d Under the opening eye-lids of the morn, We drove a-field; and both together heard What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn, Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night, Oft till the star that rose at evening bright Towards Heaven’s descent had sloped his westering wheel. Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute, Temper’d to the oaten flute: Rough satyrs danced, and fauns with cloven heel From the glad sound would not be absent long, And old Dametas loved to hear our song. But oh the heavy change, now thou art gone, Now thou art gone, and never must return! Thee, shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves With wild thyme and the gadding vine o’ergrown, And all their echoes mourn. The willows and the hazel copses green Shall now no more be seen Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. As killing as the canker to the rose, Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze, Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear, When first the white-thorn blows; Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd’s ear!’ After the fine apostrophe on Fame which Phœbus is invoked to utter, the poet proceeds: