The visions of England :: :: University of Virginia Library

Cloked in gray threadbare poverty, and blind,
Age-weak, and desolate, and beloved of God;
High-heartedness to long repulse resign'd,
Yet bating not one jot of hope, he trod
The sunless skyless streets he could not see;
By those faint feet made sacrosanct to me.

Yet on that laureate brow the sign he wore
Of Phoebus' wrath; who,—for his favourite child,
When war and faction raised their rancorous roar,
Leagued with fanatic frenzy, blood-defiled,
To the sweet Muses and himself untrue,—
Around the head he loved thick darkness threw.

—He goes:—But with him glides the Pleiad throng
Of that imperial line, whom Phoebus owns
His ownest: for, since his, no later song
Has soar'd, as wide-wing'd, to the diadem'd thrones
That, in their inmost heaven, the Muses high
Set for the sons of immortality.

Most loved, most lovely, near him as he went,
Vergil:

placed first as most like Milton in consummate art and permanent exquisiteness of phrase. It is to him, also, (if to any one), that Milton is metrically indebted.—The other poets classed as ‘Imperial’ are Homer, Sappho, Archilochus, Dante, Shakespeare. The supremacy in rank which the writer has here ventured to limit to these seven poets, (though with a strong feeling of diffidence in view of certain other Hellenic and Roman claims), is assigned to Sappho and Archilochus, less on account of the scanty fragments, though they be ‘more golden than gold,’ which have reached us, than in confidence that the place collateral with Homer, given them by their countrymen (who criticized as admirably as they created), was, in fact, justified by their poetry.

and He, supremest for all time,
In hoary blindness:—But the sweet lament
Of Lesbian love, the Parian song sublime,
Follow'd:—and that stern Florentine apart
Cowl'd himself dark in thought, within his heart

129

Nursing the dream

Dante's political wishes and speculations, wholly opposed to Milton's, are, however, like his in their impracticable originality.

of Church and Caesar's State,
Empire and Faith:—while Fancy's favourite child,
The myriad-minded, moving up sedate
Beckon'd his countryman, and inly smiled:—
Then that august Theophany

Vision of the Gods.

paled from view,
To higher stars drawn up, and kingdoms new.

The last ten years of Milton's life were passed at his house situate in the (then) ‘Artillery Walk,’ Bunhill, near Aldersgate. He is described as a spare figure, of middle stature or a little less, who walked, generally clothed in a gray camblet overcoat, in the streets between Bunhill and Little Britain.