Militant, with Meditations Divine and Moral, and Sion's Elegies, wept by Jeremie the Prophet (1624); and Sion's Sonnets, sung by Solomon the King, and Paraphrased (1625). The pensive Drummond struck a divine note in the year that Shakespeare died in his Poems (1616), and in the year that Shakespeare's fellows published the First Folio (1623) he gathered a nosegay of Flowres of Sion. Herbert of Bemerton, the darling of the heavenly Muses, came next in The Temple (1631); then Wither, whilom satirist, hunter with shepherds, and worshipper of ideal virtue, with his translation of the Psalms (1632); then Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York, and translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses, with his Paraphrase of the Psalms (1636); and then Crashaw, a Fellow of Peterhouse, who was expelled from Cambridge for refusing to subscribe the Covenant, and became a Catholic, and who followed Herbert, longo intervallo, in his Steps to the Temple (1646). Other poets to whom Siloa's brook was a source of inspiration at this period were Drayton, who wrote the Harmony of the Church, containing the Spiritual Songs and Holy Hymns of Godly Men, Patriarchs and Prophets, all sweetly sounding to the Glory of the Highest; Sir John Beaumont, elder brother of Beaumont, the dramatist, who wrote the Crown of Thorns; Donne, who wrote Sacred Sonnets, probably after James had made him Dean of St. Paul's; Cowley, who wrote the Davideis; Habington, who spiritualized the third edition of his Castara with twenty-two sacred poems; and King, Bishop of Chichester, and Vaughan, the Silurist, who were both touched to fine issues by the devotional spirit of the

time. But a greater than these--the son of a prosperous scrivener, a scholar of St. Paul's, and a Bachelor of Arts at Christ's College, Cambridge-had already surpassed all these poets in sacred song, and was at last to surpass all poets with a Divine Epic.

Milton had just completed his twenty-first year, when, in December, 1629, he wrote his hymn On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, which was followed on the 1st of January, 1630, by his ode on The Circumcision, and at Easter by an unfinished poem on The Passion. He remained at the University seven years, and, quitting it Master of Arts in the summer of 1632, went to the little rural village of Horton, not far from Windsor Castle, whither his father had removed on his retirement from business, and devoted the next six years to study and meditation. He strictly meditated the Muse, and she was not thankless, for she crystallized the morning dew of his genius into those exquisite jewels in the ears of antiquity, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; she directed him in the graver walks of the drama while he wrote that noblest of all English masques, Comus; and she strengthened and solemnized his strain in that incomparable monody, Lycidas. In his thirtieth year he made a pilgrimage to Italy, as was the fashion with young English gentlemen of the time, and, travelling slowly by land and water, visited some of its famous cities and famous men-among the latter Manso, Marquis of Villa, the friend and biographer of Tasso, whom he met at Naples, and the blind Galileo, with whom he spoke at his country house near Florence. But this happy, poetic life was not to last. For if the English poets had long shown an aptitude

for writing history, the English people had long shown an aptitude for making history, and they were now making it in a new direction. We find him after his return to England living for a time in lodgings in St. Bride's Church-yard, where he taught Edward and John Phillips, the sons of his dead sister Anne, and where he still meditated the Muse. He sketched out the plans of several sacred dramas, one on Sodom, another on The Deluge, another on The Redemption of Isaac, and― greatest of all-another on the Fall of Man, which had not yet assumed epical proportions. How and what he made history we know, and we know how and what history made him, changing the heavenly poet into the earthly politician, the exquisite scholar into the scurrilous controversialist, and those eyes that wont to outwatch the Bear and unsphere the spirit of Plato into blind, sightless orbs! He sank with the Commonwealth, but, unlike the Commonwealth, he sank to rise again. The greatness of the man was conspicuous in his blindness, for though he was fallen on evil days and evil tongues, he was unchanged, and though he was in solitude he was not alone. Urania visited his slumbers nightly, and governed his song, and found an audience -fit audience, though few. The Spirit of Heavenly Song attained its greatest height with Paradise Lost in 1667, and, slowly wheeling through the firmament of English Verse, began to descend in 1671 with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. It reached the lowest deep in the next half century in the Psalms and Hymns of Watts.

The movement of the lyrical current in English Verse, at whatever period it may have entered it, and

whatever may have been its origin, demanded recognition in the last half of the sixteenth century. Perceptible beside the sonnet movement of Wyatt, Surrey, and others in Tottel's Miscellany, it was noticeable among the sonnets of Sidney, and marked in the poetic work of his contemporaries. If it had not been supplied at this period by the law which governs the intellectual development of peoples, it would have been supplied at this period by the social condition of the English people, which clamored for musical expression. The age of Elizabeth was musical beyond any that preceded or succeeded it. "Nobody could then pretend to a liberal education who had not made such a progress in Musick as to be able to sing his part at sight; and it was usual when ladies and gentlemen met, for Madrigal books to be laid before them, and every one to sing their part." Not to be able to sing was to be looked upon with wonder, if not disfavor, the accomplishment was so universal. No reader of English Verse need be told that every Elizabethan poet of note except Spenser was a writer of lyrics. The lyric element was as active then as the dramatic element, and when the dramatic element exhausted its energies the lyric dwindled, peaked, and pined. dominant the reign of the Lyric was in English Verse Dr. Rimbault has shown us in his Bibliotheca Madrigaliana. It lasted fifty years (1588-1638), and produced ninety-two separate collections of Madrigals, Ballets, Ayres, Canzonets, Roundelays, Catches, Glees, Pastorals, and the music to which they were wedded-the whole amounting to upward of two thousand different pieces! This corpus poetarum was not selected, as one

How

might suppose, from the great names of the time, for though the lines of Shakespeare, Spenser, Raleigh, Sidney, Drayton, Sylvester, Nash, and others may occasionally be recognized, the names of the writers, except in a few instances, are entirely unknown. It is a pity, for some of them were poets. The majority probably wrote at the request of their friends,-practitioners in the art of music, bachelors of music, gentlemen of Her Majesty's honorable chapel, organists, lutenists, and what not, the minority writing to order for Byrd, Morley, Dowland, Wilbye, Weelkes, Este, Alison, Farmer, Campion, and other popular composers. The Lyric Literature of England is distinguished for its extent, and its excellence. Everything that lyric poetry can be it is. It is simple and artless; it is studied and artful. It is the wild note of a bird in bush or brake; it is the trained voice in a choir. The shepherd sings as he unpens his flock: the ploughman sings as he urges on his steer: the milkmaid sings as she sits with her pail beside the fulluddered kine. Lads and lasses warble roundelays as they dance around the Maypole. Roysterers troll catches as they drain their cups of Sack or Sherris. My lady trills a canzonet as she touches the virginals in her chamber, and my lord without hums a huntingchorus as he strolls toward his stables. What Dr. Johnson said of his fellows at Pembroke College a century and a half later was true of the Elizabethan poets-they were a nest of singing birds. They put their souls into their songs as never poets before or since, and they enriched them with every poetic quality -with simplicity and freshness, sweetness and tender