Page:Scribner's magazine (IA scribnersmagazin16newy).pdf/351

"As a master of harmony and of easily maintained elevation, in English blank verse," writes Lowell, "Milton has no rival. He was" (versed, he first wrote) "skilled in many tongues and many literatures; he had weighed the value of words, whether for sound or sense, or where the two may be of mutual help. He, surely, if any, was what he calls 'a mint-master of language.' He must have known, if any ever knew, that even in the sermo pedestris there are yet great differences in gait, that prose is governed by laws of modulation as exact, if not so exacting, as those of verse, and that it may conjure with words as prevailingly. The music is secreted in it, yet often more potent in suggestion than that of any verse which is not of utmost mastery. We hearken after it as to a choir in the side-chapel of some cathedral, heard faintly and fitfully across the long desert of the nave, now pursuing and overtaking the cadences, only to have them grow doubtful again and elude the ear before it has ceased to throb with them. . . . Milton is not so truly a writer of great prose as a great man writing in prose, and it is really Milton we seek there more than anything else." Therefore because we seek Milton we value the early editions of his works which are upon the shelf of old books. Dryden is said to have remarked, when the first edition of "Paradise Lost" met his eye: "The man cuts us all out, and the ancients too." It is not unlikely that the quaint remark of Mr. S. Simmons, the printer, to his "Courteous Reader," upon the first page on this first edition, had in view Dryden and other celebrated writers and critics of that century. It may well have "stumbled" Dryden, who never freed himself from the shackles of rhyme to read the stately blank verse of Milton for the first time. Milton lived largely "in a world of disesteem," and had grown somewhat hardy perhaps in the cold winds which brought him no fruit of approval from the harvests of the world. He wrote his prose with a stinging pen, and when music from upper airs came to him for transmission in verse he took no counsel from the nether sphere as to form or doctrine. His first appearance in letters was in the second folio of Shakespeare, where three anonymous tributes to Shakespeare's genius prefaced the plays. Milton and Ben Jonson wrote two of them. A small volume came somewhat later, in 1645, containing his early poems, and the second edition of this book, printed in 1673, lies before me. It belonged to Thomas Gray when a schoolboy, his name being written only nine times by himself upon the title-page.

Bust of Milton, about 1654. (From a photograph of the only mould of the original cast from life, preserved in Trinity College Library, Cambridge, England. By kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity.)

There have been innumerable editions of the "Paradise Lost" printed in every