Stone walls do not a prison make,
      Nor iron bars a cage;
    Minds innocent and quiet take
      That for an hermitage. 
    If I have freedom in my love,
      And in my soul am free,
    Angels alone that soar above
      Enjoy such liberty.

JOHN MILTON (1608-1674)

    Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;
    Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea—­
    Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free;
    So didst thou travel on life’s common way
    In cheerful godliness:  and yet thy heart
    The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 
        (From Wordsworth’s “Sonnet on Milton”)

Shakespeare and Milton are the two figures that tower conspicuously above the goodly fellowship of men who have made our literature famous.  Each is representative of the age that produced him, and together they form a suggestive commentary upon the two forces that rule our humanity,—­the force of impulse and the force of a fixed purpose.  Shakespeare is the poet of impulse, of the loves, hates, fears, jealousies, and ambitions that swayed the men of his age.  Milton is the poet of steadfast will and purpose, who moves like a god amid the fears and hopes and changing impulses of the world, regarding them as trivial and momentary things that can never swerve a great soul from its course.

It is well to have some such comparison in mind while studying the literature of the Elizabethan and the Puritan Age.  While Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and their unequaled company of wits make merry at the Mermaid Tavern, there is already growing up on the same London street a poet who shall bring a new force into literature, who shall add to the Renaissance culture and love of beauty the tremendous moral earnestness of the Puritan.  Such a poet must begin, as the Puritan always began, with his own soul, to discipline and enlighten it, before expressing its beauty in literature.  “He that would hope to write well hereafter in laudable things,” says Milton, “ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and most honorable things.”  Here is a new proposition in art which suggests the lofty ideal of Fra Angelico, that before one can write literature, which is the expression of the ideal, he must first develop in himself the ideal man.  Because Milton is human he must know the best in humanity; therefore he studies, giving his days to music, art, and literature, his nights to profound research and meditation.  But because he knows that man is more than mortal he also prays, depending, as he tells us, on “devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge.”  Such a poet is already in spirit far beyond the Renaissance, though he lives in the autumn of its glory and associates with its literary masters.  “There is a spirit in man,” says the old Hebrew poet, “and