life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered
student, issuing at early dawn, or at sunset, into the fields from his
chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells are here
blended in that ineffable combination, which once or twice perhaps in
our lives has saluted our young senses before their perceptions were
blunted by

alcohol, by lust, or ambition, or diluted by the social
distractions of great cities.

The fidelity to nature of the imagery of these poems
has been impugned by the critics.

Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good morrow.

The skylark never approaches human habitations in this way, as the
redbreast does, Mr. Masson replies that the subject of the verb "to
come" is, not the skylark, but L'Allegro, the joyous student. I cannot
construe the lines as Mr. Masson does, even though the consequence
were to convict Milton, a city-bred youth, of not knowing a skylark
from a sparrow when he saw it. A close observer of things around us
would not speak of the eglantine as twisted, of the cowslip as wan,
of the violet as glowing, or of the reed as balmy. Lycidas' laureate
hearse is to be strewn at once with primrose and woodbine, daffodil
and jasmine. When we read "the rathe primrose that forsaken dies," we
see that the poet is recollecting Shakespeare (Winter's Tale, 4. 4),
not looking at the primrose. The pine is not "rooted deep as high"
(_P.R._ 4416), but sends its roots along the surface. The elm, one of
the thinnest foliaged trees of the forest, is inappropriately named