Milton attended in the Comus to the distinction which he afterward neglected in the Samson.  He made his Masque what it ought to be, essentially lyrical, and dramatic only in semblance.  He has not attempted a fruitless struggle against a defect inherent in the nature of that species of composition; and he has therefore succeeded, wherever success was not impossible.  The speeches must be read as majestic soliloquies; and he who so reads them will be enraptured with their eloquence, their sublimity, and their music.  The interruptions of the dialogue, however, impose a constraint upon the writer, and break the illusion of the reader.  The finest passages are those which are lyric in form as well as in spirit.  “I should much commend,” says the excellent Sir Henry Wotton in a letter to Milton, “the tragical part if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto, I must plainly confess to you, I have seen yet nothing parallel in our language.”  The criticism was just.  It is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is discharged from the labor of uniting two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even above himself.  Then, like his own good Genius bursting from the earthly form and weeds of Thyrsis, he stands forth in celestial freedom and beauty; he seems to cry exultingly,

     “Now my task is smoothly done,
      I can fly or I can run,”

to skim the earth, to soar above the clouds, to bathe in the Elysian dew of the rainbow, and to inhale the balmy smells of nard and cassia, which the musky winds of the zephyr scatter through the cedared alleys of the Hesperides.

There are several of the minor poems of Milton on which we would willingly make a few remarks.  Still more willingly would we enter into a detailed examination of that admirable poem, the Paradise Regained, which, strangely enough, is scarcely ever mentioned except as an instance of the blindness of the parental affection which men of letters bear toward the offspring of their intellects.  That Milton was mistaken in preferring this work, excellent as it is, to the Paradise Lost, we readily admit.  But we are sure that the superiority of the Paradise Lost to the Paradise Regained is not more decided than the superiority of the Paradise Regained to every poem which has since made its appearance.  Our limits, however, prevent us from discussing the point at length.  We hasten on to that extraordinary production which the general suffrage of critics has placed in the highest class of human compositions.

The only poem of modern times which can be compared with the Paradise Lost is the Divine Comedy.  The subject of Milton, in some points, resembled that of Dante; but he has treated it in a widely different manner.  We cannot, we think, better illustrate our opinion respecting our own great poet than by contrasting him with the father of Tuscan literature.