Page images
PDF
EPUB
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co.

Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

THE NEW BIRTH.

GOD spake in a voice of thunder,
Of old from Sinai's hill;
And the mystic words of wonder
Thrill the believer still;
He sees in the vault above him,
With the eye of faith alone,
Gemmed round by the souls that love him,

The great Creator's throne.

He sees, in the day of danger,
The column of cloud that led,
From the land of the alien stranger,
His Israel whom he fed;

And knows, tho' his footsteps wander
Astray in a twilight land,
That his home is building yonder,
By the one unerring hand.

He sees, in the night of peril,
The pillar of fire that shone
From the halls of pearl and beryl,
To light God's children on;
And feels that straight from Heaven,
When the eye of sense grows dim,
Shall a grander sight be given
To all who trust in him.

On the page of the mighty ocean
He reads the mightier still,
Who curbs its restless motion
By the law of his royal will;
And while in its course diurnal
It murmurs, or sings, or raves,
He lists to the voice eternal,
In the language of the waves.

He marks in the plants around him
The throbs of a life their own,

While the wordless worlds that bound him
Whisper their undertone.

From the hawk and the hound yet clearer
He hears the secret fall,
Which nearer to him and nearer
Brings the great God of all.

In the leaves that blow and perish
In the space of a single hour,
As the loves that most we cherish
Die like the frailest flower, -
In the living things whose living
Withers or e'er they bloom,
He reads of the great thanksgiving,
Which breathes from the open tomb.

The bright spring leaves returning
To the stem whence autumn's fell,
And the heart of summer burning,
To change at the winter's spell,
The year that again repasses,
The grain that again revives,
Are signs on the darkened glasses
That bar and bound our lives.

[blocks in formation]

WHEN to the birds their morning meal I
threw,
Beside one pretty candidate for bread
There flash'd and wink'd a tiny drop of dew;
But while I gazed, I lost them, both had fled;
His careless tread had struck the blade-hung
tear,

And all its silent beauty fell away;
And left, sole relic of the twinkling sphere,
A sparrow's dabbled foot upon a spray.
Bold bird! that didst efface a lovely thing
Before a poet's eyes! I've half a mind,
Could I but single thee from out thy kind,
To mulct thee in a crumb; a crumb to thee
Is not more sweet than that fair drop to me;
Fie on thy little foot and thrumming wing!
CHAS. TENNYSON TURNER.

From The Modern Review.

JOHN MILTON.*

THE completion of Professor Masson's "Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time," is an event worthy of grateful recognition by all liberal Englishmen. The first volume of the work was in our hands in Decem

broadest grounds of personal liberty of both thought and action; and the time is fast approaching when an unlimited universality will be acknowledged as the only possible area for the exhibition of Milton's genius. As soon as he emerged from the strife of parties and the odium of the Restoration, his poetical genius was acknowledged on all sides, and his name

ber 1858. The preface to the sixth vol- placed second in the roll of English ume is dated December, 1879. To those poets.

who welcomed the first volume the ap- A century later, when men looked back pearances of the others from time to time to the English Commonwealth for the rise during a period of twenty-one years have of the principles of civil and religious libafforded a series of literary pleasures of erty, Milton's political writings attracted no common kind. Professor Masson has the attention they deserved. His colplaced the whole of the events and cir- lected prose works were first published in cumstances of Milton's life before us in 1698, with Toland's biography prefixed.

These volumes are folios, and though bearing the name of Amsterdam on their title-pages, were really printed in London. Birch's editions followed in 1738 and 1753; and Dr. Symmons's edition, with a translation of the "Defensio Secunda"

one work. The twenty-one years of publication must have been preceded by many years of labor in preparation and collection, in order to account for the large result. But it is such a result as could only be attained by the well-directed labors of a single mind. No "Milton by Robert Fellowes, M.A., was published

in 1806, in seven handsome 8vo volumes, with a life by Dr. Symmons, in many respects, and from a Whig-Revolution point of view, very admirable. A popular edition appeared in 1838 with a fine "Introductory Review," by Robert Fletcher; and now the whole of the prose works,

Society" could have wrought a work like this; but the work itself may leave room for the operations of such a society. Although the professor has reaped the whole field and carried the harvest, yet he may have left many dropped and scattered ears for the gleaners. Before long a Milton Society may perhaps be formed including Bishop Sumner's translation on some basis like that of the various of the "Treatise on Christian Doctrine,"

Shakespeare and other societies. At present Milton has scarcely passed out of the sphere of party; and while in such a sphere, sections of party will set up their peculiar claims to him. Some of our readers may have a recollection of the unsuccessful attempt some years ago to establish a Milton Club, which failed in consequence of a design to subject the membership to a kind of orthodox test. This experiment is not likely to be repeated. The influence of Milton's name can never be enlisted in favor of any scheme which does not rest upon the

* The Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. By David Masson, M.A., in the University of Edinburgh. 6 vols., 1859-1880.

LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature

London: Macmillan and Co.

forms part of Bohn's Standard Library.

It may, therefore, be fairly said that the body of Milton's works - a literature in themselves - is in every library, and is an element in the intellectual life-blood of England.

Still, there is one characteristic feature of Milton's mind which removes him from the admiration and sympathy of a considerable section of the religious world. This is his rigid, anti-sacerdotal spirit. Milton is essentially Protestant, and, therefore, repugnant to all ritualists, whether Roman or Anglican. Even our great statesman, whose Homeric studies have won for him a high place in literature, cannot give ungrudging welcome to Milton. Homer and Shakespeare claim universal homage without limitation or Milton is both a Puritan and a In preparing for the work of his life as that of a poet in the highest sense, the purposes of Milton were so pure and so lofty that there can be no doubt he would, but for adverse circumstances, have shone as a luminary in literature without admixture of mundane things. Until his thirty-first year, Milton was only a son of the Muses. His stores of learning and observation, his aspiring genius, his chaste life, and his devout spirit were being trained and directed into the sphere of the imagination for the production of works which should win an immortality of fame. It is difficult to conjecture what the results of his genius might have been without the interruptions of political conflict and the modifications of religious controversy. But surely no soaring spirit was ever so clogged and hindered by circumstances as that wandering student, who was drawn by events from the fields of Italy and the mountains of Greece to yoke Pegasus to the task of dragging his country out of the sloughs of despotism and anarchy before he could be allowed to rise from the earth and traverse the "realms of gold." Thus it happens that there are two Miltons with whom we have to deal, and until both of them shall be completely presented to us we have a difficulty in estimating the whole man. Professor Masson has made this presentation, and in his volumes we have all the materials before us.

reserve.

heretic, and draws from his countrymen | did not begin until after his return, in the a less complete, though perhaps an in- July of 1639, from his visit to the Contitenser, worship. Shakespeare was happy nent. He would gladly have remained in filling the imagination of mankind with a flood of light unobscured by a cloud or even a transient vapor from the political and ecclesiastical turmoils of his age. So might it have been with the great poet of the seventeenth century, had he not fallen "on evil days."

abroad much longer than he did; and, indeed, he intended to pursue his travels into Greece, and he would doubtless have spent more time in the cities and among the societies most congenial to his tastes and his lofty literary aims. When he was enjoying all the delights of foreign travel and society, he had already brought his education to a perfect maturity; and by his writings up to that time he had satisfied the best judges as well as himself of his powers and capacities for poetry. Nothing had been omitted or left incomplete in his work of self-culture and preparation. He had submitted himself to the judgment of the most learned and most noble of his contemporaries in England, France, Switzerland, and Italy, and had won from every quarter approval and encouragement. Grotius, Galileo, and Manso, and many other poets, scholars, and divines, received the young Englishman, and recognized his talent. His English poetry sounded with strains unheard since Shakespeare sang. "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," "Comus" and "Lycidas," fell on the ears of his countrymen with a delight which none but the strains of the age of Spenser could awaken. In Latin verse, and in the complimentary sonnets which he wrote in the Italian tongue, he had approved himself a master in the opinion of foreigners. It might seem that nothing remained but to wait for time to mature his mind for some supreme expression of his imagination which the world would not willingly let die. But the career he longed for and expected was suddenly checked, and it might have been forever.

It is this change from an even tenor to an interrupted life which has led his biographer to adopt the method of placing the history of the times and the biography of his subject before the reader in such a way as to do full justice to both. The first volume, as we said, was out in December, 1858. The second volume came out in March, 1871; and in his preface of that date, Professor Masson felt himhis work - a plan partly adopted in the first volume, but not so necessary to it as to the volumes which were to follow. He says:

The difficulty of the work seems to have pressed itself on the mind of the biographer with especial force as soon as he had completed his first volume. This volume covers the period of Milton's life from his birth in 1608 until his thirty-first year, and is almost purely a narrative biography; and for this reason: that the disturbing influences of the poet's career | self called upon to explain the plan of

Now, while it is the right of the public to say what they want in the shape of a book, it is equally the right of an author to say what he means to offer; and accordingly I repeat that this work is not a Biography only, but a Biography together with a History... No one can study the life of Milton as it ought to be studied without being obliged to study, extensively and intimately, the contemporary history of England and even, incidentally, of Scotland and Ireland too. Experience has confirmed my previous conviction that it must be so. Again and again in order to understand Milton, his position, his motives, his thoughts by himself, his public words to his countrymen and the probable effects of those words, I have had to stop in the mere Biography and range round largely and windingly in the History of his Time, not only as it is presented in well-known books, but as it had to be rediscovered by express and laborious investigation in original and forgotten records. Thus on the very compulsion, or at least by the suasion, of the Biography, a History grew

on my hands.

With the plan of the author thus clearly indicated, we have no right to complain that Professor Masson's six volumes are both a history and a biography; and when once we have discovered his method, we find it a very useful one. Milton's life and writings were so mixed up with public affairs that any adequate account of him implies what Masson describes as the "incessant connection of the history and the biography - the history always sending me back more fully informed for the biography, and the biography again suggesting new tracks for the history." Nor are the intercalary portions of the work confined to the ordinary history of the period. In the first volume we have a comprehensive survey of British literature, giving a view of it generally at the time when Milton resolved to connect himself with it. And in the sixth volume a chapter of one hundred and thirtytwo pages is devoted to a survey of the first seven years of the literature of the Restoration. From the second volume onwards we find every volume divided

into "books," and every book devoted to distinct portions of "history" and "biography;" while the chapters into which the books are subdivided take the portions of the history and the biography in the order of convenience; one book being divided into two or three chapters only, and another into as many as eight. Take, for instance, the second volume. The first book is classified into "History - The Scottish Presbyterian Revolt," and "Biography - Milton Back in England." Chapter I. The Scottish Covenanters and the First Bishops' War. Chapter II. Milton Back in England-Old Friends - Epitaphium Damonis Lodgings, etc. - Literary Projects, etc. Chapter III. returns to history, and is about Bishop Hall's "Episcopacy," "The Short Parliament and the Second Bishops' War." In the volume in question, one book is devoted to the history of English Presbyterianism and Independency up to 1643-a chapter by itself, but of great importance, and following immediately upon a very careful account of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. If we regard Vol. II., as we have briefly described it, as a specimen of the whole work, we shall get an idea of the amount of labor bestowed in bringing together such a vast accumulation of materials. In fact, we have a minute biography and an elaborate history so arranged as to afford the advantages of each. We might further distribute the historical portions into civil, ecclesiastical, social, and literary history; and for everything of interest in all of these departments the work will be consulted by students of each subject. What a well-furnished library could scarcely yield to the most diligent after a laborious search, the reader can now find within the compass of Masson's six volumes. A seventh with an index is promised, and is very much needed; and the more complete the apparatus, the better for future readers. Though we read the volumes as they came out, when we look into them again with the intention of giving some account of them, we cannot but feel dismayed at the extent of the field which lies open before us. It is impossible for us to do more than to invite others

« PreviousContinue »