On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and
receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in
intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English
poetry: the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.
Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than
dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it.
Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his
splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Horton he wrote,
among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an
expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which
belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elizabethan court
masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of
the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.
Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe,
with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of chastity
and temperance. _Lycidas_, in like manner, was the perfection of the
Elizabethan pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a volume of memorial
verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge friend of Milton's, who
was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637.
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