He was not nice in
the choice of his missiles, and too often borrows a dirty lump from the
dunghill of Luther; but now and then the gnarled sticks of controversy
turn to golden arrows of Phoebus in his trembling hands, singing as they
fly and carrying their messages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his
prose as in his verse, his is the large utterance of the early gods, and
there is that in him which tramples all learning under his victorious
feet. From the first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated and set
apart. He had that sublime persuasion of a divine mission which sometimes
lifts his speech from personal to cosmopolitan significance; his genius
unmistakably asserts itself from time to time, calling down fire from
heaven to kindle the sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning the
hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the worship of mankind.
Plainly enough here was a man who had received something other than
Episcopal ordination. Mysterious and awful powers had laid their
unimaginable hands on that fair head and devoted it to a nobler service.
Yet it must be confessed that, with the single exception of the
"Areopagitica," Milton's tracts are wearisome reading, and going through
them is like a long sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated
for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a
drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks of silver,
as if the conscious element were giving out all the moonlight it had
garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent.
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