_mean_ St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey? When these things can continue
to be asked, it is hardly superfluous to continue to repeat, that
truth of fact and poetical truth are two different things. Milton's
attitude towards nature is not that of a "descriptive poet", if indeed
the phrase be not a self-contradiction.

In Milton, nature is not put forward as the poet's theme. His theme
is man, in the two contrasted moods of joyous emotion, or grave
reflection. The shifting scenery ministers to the varying mood.
Thomson, in the _Seasons_ (1726), sets himself to render natural
phenomena as they truly are. He has left us a vivid presentation in
gorgeous language of the naturalistic calendar of the changing year.
Milton, in these two idylls, has recorded a day of twenty-four
hours. But he has not registered the phenomena; he places us at the
standpoint of the man before whom they deploy. And the man, joyous
or melancholy, is not a bare spectator of them; he is the student,
compounded of sensibility and intelligence, of whom we are not told
that he saw so and so, or that he felt so, but with whom we are
made copartners of his thoughts and feeling. Description melts into
emotion, and contemplation bodies itself in imagery. All the charm of
rural life is there, but it is not tendered to us in the form of a
landscape; the scenery is subordinated to the human figure in the
centre.

These two short idylls are marked by a gladsome spontaneity which
never came to Milton again. The delicate fancy and feeling which play
about _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ never reappear, and form a strong
contrast to the austere imaginings of his later poetical period. These
two poems have the freedom and frolic, the natural grace of movement,
the improvisation, of the best Elizabethan examples, while both