generally depends on mood rather than on circumstance. Milton, on the
other hand, until fairly embarked on his great epic, was comparatively
an unproductive, and literally an occasional poet. Most of his pieces,
whether English or Latin, owe their existence to some impulse from
without: "Comus" to the solicitation of a patron, "Lycidas" to the death
of a friend. The "Allegro" and the "Penseroso" seem almost the only two
written at the urgency of an internal impulse; and perhaps, if we knew
their history, we should discover that they too were prompted by
extraneous suggestion or provoked into being by accident. Such is the
way with Court poets like Dryden and Claudian; it is unlike the usual
procedure of Milton's spiritual kindred. Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, write
incessantly; whatever care they may bestow upon composition, the
impulse to produce is never absent. With Milton it is commonly dormant
or ineffectual; he is always studying, but the fertility of his mind
bears no apparent proportion to the pains devoted to its cultivation. He
is not, like Wordsworth, labouring at a great work whose secret progress
fills him with a majestic confidence; or, like Coleridge, dreaming of
works which he lacks the energy to undertake; or, save once, does he
seem to have felt with Keats:--

"Fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before that books, in high piled charactery,
Hold in rich garners the full ripened grain."

He neither writes nor wishes to write; he simply studies, piling up the
wood on the altar, and conscious of the power to call down fire from
Heaven when he will. There is something sublime in this assured
confidence; yet its wisdom is less evident than its grandeur. "No man,"
says Shelley, "can say, 'I will compose poetry.'" If he cannot say this