Landor, who, like Milton, seems to have thought in Latin, has caught
somewhat more than others of the dignity of his gait, but without his
length of stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it,
but with how long an interval! Bryant has not seldom attained to its
serene equanimity, but never emulates its pomp. Keats has caught
something of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its nervous
severity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that moved with such graceful ease in
slippers) becomes stiff when (in his translation of Homer) she buckles on
her feet the cothurnus of Milton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he assays
the grandiosity of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse of the
slow processes by which Milton arrived at that classicism which sets him
apart from, if not above, all our other poets.
In gathering up the impressions made upon us by Mr. Masson's work as a
whole, we are inclined rather to regret his copiousness for his own sake
than for ours. The several parts, though disproportionate, are valuable,
his research has been conscientious, and he has given us better means of
understanding Milton's time than we possessed before. But how is it about
Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of
portrait-painting. There is hardly a more stately figure in literary
history than Milton's, no life in some of its aspects more tragical,
except Dante's.
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