Doubtless all readers are familiar with Dr. Johnson’s criticisms on Milton’s Lycidas, and these we might pass by without comment, for it would evidently be as impossible for Dr. Johnson’s mind to comprehend or be touched by the poetry of Lycidas as for a ponderous sledge-hammer to be conscious of the soft, perfume-laden air through which it might move. The monody is censured by him because of its irregularly recurring rhymes, and in the same breath we are told that it is so full of art that the author could not have felt sorrow while writing it. We know how intricately the rhymes are woven in Milton’s sonnets, where he seems to have taken all pains to select the most difficult arrangements, and to carry them through without deviation, and we say only that the first criticism contradicts the last. But some more appreciative critics, while touched by the beauty, repeat the same, and say there is “more poetry than sorrow” in the poem. More poetry than sorrow! Sorrow is the grand key note, and strikes in always over and through all the beauty and poetry like a wailing chord in a symphony, that is never absent long, and ever and anon drowns out all the rest. Sorrow, pure and simple, is the thread on which all the beautiful fancies are strung. It runs through and connects them all, and there is not a paragraph in the whole poem that is not pierced by it. It is the occasion, the motive, the inner inspiration, and the mastery over it is the conclusion of all. Around it, the constant centre, group themselves all the lovely pictures, and they all face it and are subordinate to it. The soul of the poet is so tossed by the immediate sorrow that it surrenders itself entirely to it, and so, losing its will, is taken possession of by whatever thought, evoked by the spell of association, rises in his mind; as when he speaks of Camus and St. Peter. Ever and anon the will makes an effort to free itself and to determine its own course, but again and again the wave of sorrow sweeps up, and the vainly struggling will goes down before it.