of himself to-day, still less can he say it of himself to-morrow. He
cannot tell whether the illusions of youth will forsake him wholly;
whether the joy of creation will cease to thrill; what unpropitious
blight he may encounter in an enemy or a creditor, or harbour in an
uncongenial mate. Milton, no doubt, entirely meant what he said when he
told Diodati: "I am letting my wings grow and preparing to fly, but my
Pegasus has not yet feathers enough to soar aloft in the fields of air."
But the danger of this protracted preparation was shown by his narrow
escape from poetical shipwreck when the duty of the patriot became
paramount to that of the poet. The Civil War confounded his
anticipations of leisurely composition, and but for the disguised
blessing of his blindness, the mountain of his attainment might have
been Pisgah rather than Parnassus.

It is in keeping with the infrequency of Milton's moods of overmastering
inspiration, and the strength of will which enabled him to write
steadily or abstain from writing at all, that his early compositions
should be, in general, so much more correct than those of other English
poets of the first rank. The childish bombast of "Titus Andronicus," the
commonplace of Wordsworth, the frequent inanity of the youthful
Coleridge and the youthful Byron, Shelley's extravagance, Keats's
cockneyism, Tennyson's mawkishness, find no counterpart in Milton's
early compositions. All these great writers, though the span of some of
them was but short, lived long enough to blush for much of what they had
in the days of their ignorance taken for poetry. The mature Milton had
no cause to be ashamed of anything written by the immature Milton,
reasonable allowance being made for the inevitable infection of
contemporary false taste. As a general rule, the youthful exuberance of
a Shakespeare would be a better sign; faults, no less than beauties,
often indicate the richness of the soil. But Milton was born to confute