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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 15, 1894)
4 THE BATTALION. quel, Paradise Regained, we have here the spirit of Puritanism at its best and noblest. The weaker elements of the poem are equally the defects of Puritan ism: the strange lack of humor, making the descent from the sublime to the ridiculous so easy, as in the description of the artillery that plays its part in the war in Heaven; the shocking irrever ence that is all unconscious that it is irreverent, as in the hardihood with which God the Father is brought before us talking like a school divine; the lack of genial humanity, making Eve little more than a moving statue of beauty. The “might}^ line” and the involved harmony of its music, the rich ness and variety of the scenes put before the imagination, the awe and mystery of the subject, are the chief attractions of the poem. As it is not commonly valued so highly as it deserves. I beg you to give your closer attention to the Samson Agonistes. This poem is the most se verely beautiful of Milton’s works. Utterly bare of ornament; it contrasts singularly with his earlier poems in which there is so lavish a profusion of imagei^-. Compare its almost statuesque grandeur with the rich embroidery of the Masque of Comus, where the colors seem rather those of elaborate tapestry than of that word-painting which character izes even the most brilliant poetry. We can, then, note only too clearly how pri vate griefs, and disdain of the evil that had for the time triumphed, had stripped his great soul of its mellower tints and robbed his genius of the de light it had once taken in bright things. Even in the early tide"of song, which for him began so soon, his genius had been Hellenic. Thought and coloring were both subordinated to form, from the Hymn on the Nativity to the Sam son Agonistes. But in all that he pro duced before the downfall of the Com monwealth, there had been a richness of trope, metaphor, and simile, a luxurious harmony of rhythm, and that joy of the poet in the exquisite felicity of the lan guage chosen to convey his thought, which are fully in keeping with the ripe taste of Hellenic art through all its mighty current, while perfection of form is still the ideal aimed at. In verse he reflects the whole body of Hellenic poetry. In prose he has the full Platonic weight and rhymth and amplitude of illustration. But when the shadows settle down at last upon him—blind, lonely, unappre ciated, and almost hopeless of his country’s ever emerging from her saturnalia of shame and sin, the bright ness vanishes from his inner vision, and the rugged grandeur of rEschylus is the type of his heartbroken but still battling genius. The bitter strength of one of the Hebrew prophets clings to the whole spirit and structure of the poem, and in forms its design. Yet the Hellenic ideal in art remains paramount and gives to the tragedy its form throughout. Yes, in this stern play that reads as if cut in stone, the Hebraic temper, always latent in Milton, the man, comes out in foil force. But Milton, the artist, was from the first a Hellene, and could do no otherwise than work out his grand vindicatory thought in a purely Hellenic form. There are no prettinesses in the Samson. Yet naked strength has brought out qualities not found else-