‘_Camillo._ I should leave grazing, were I of your flock, And only live by gazing. ‘_Perdita._ Out, alas! You’d be so lean, that blasts of January Would blow you through and through. Now, my fairest friend, I would I had some flowers o’ th’ spring, that might Become your time of day: O Proserpina, For the flowers now, that, frighted, you let fall From Dis’s waggon! Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes, Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phœbus in his strength, a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower de lis being one. O, these I lack To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, To strew him o’er and o’er.’ Dr. Johnson’s general remark, that Milton’s genius had not room to show itself in his smaller pieces, is not well-founded. Not to mention _Lycidas_, the _Allegro_, and _Penseroso_, it proceeds on a false estimate of the merits of his great work, which is not more distinguished by strength and sublimity than by tenderness and beauty. The last were as essential qualities of Milton’s mind as the first. The battle of the angels, which has been commonly considered as the best part of the _Paradise Lost_, is the worst. W. H. NO. 11.] ON MILTON’S VERSIFICATION [AUG. 20, 1815. Milton’s works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn to Fame. His religious zeal infused its character into his imagination; and he devotes himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation of his genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the good of his country. He does not write from casual impulse, but after a severe examination of his own strength, and with a determination to leave nothing undone which it is in his power to do. He always labours, and he almost always succeeds. He strives to say the finest things in the world, and he does say them. He adorns and dignifies his subject to the utmost. He surrounds it with all the possible associations of beauty or grandeur, whether moral, or physical, or intellectual. He refines on his descriptions of beauty, till the sense almost aches at them, and raises his images of terror to a gigantic elevation, that ‘makes Ossa like a wart.’ He has a high standard, with which he is constantly comparing himself, and nothing short of which can satisfy him: ——‘Sad task, yet argument Not less but more heroic than the wrath Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued, If answerable stile I can obtain. ——Unless an age too late, or cold Climate, or years, damp my intended wing.’