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If the structure of _his_ mind be undramatic, why, then, the English
drama is naught, learned Jonson, sweetest Shakespeare, and the rest
notwithstanding, and he will compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the
blinded Samson for its hero, and he will compose it partly in rhyme.
Plainly he belongs to the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are in no
way responsible for their to-morrows. And this makes him perennially
interesting even to those who hate his politics, despise his Socinianism,
and find his greatest poem a bore. A new edition of his poems is always
welcome, for, as he is really great, he presents a fresh side to each new
student, and Mr. Masson, in his three handsome volumes, has given us,
with much that is superfluous and even erroneous, much more that is a
solid and permanent acquisition to our knowledge.
It results from the almost scornful withdrawal of Milton into the
fortress of his absolute personality that no great poet is so uniformly
self-conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare that he had the power
of transforming himself into everything; of Milton, that he had that of
transforming everything into himself. Dante is individual rather than
self-conscious, and he, the cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of
grain at the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves of sunshine.
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