On this note the elegy ends, and there follow eight lines in which the poet glances at his own pastoral self that has been singing, and realizes that the world will go on even though Lycidas be no more, and that there are other calls in life than that of piping on an oaten reed.  These lines correspond to the plain stanzaic frames in which Spenser set his lyrics in the Shepherd’s Calender: 

    Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’ Okes and rills,
    While the still morn went out with Sandals gray,
    He touch’d the tender stops of various Quills,
    With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay: 
    And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
    And now was dropt into the Western bay;
    At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew: 
    To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new.

The poem, in common with the whole class of allegorical pastorals, is undoubtedly open to the charge of artificiality, since, in truth, the pastoral garb can never illustrate, but only distort and obscure subjects drawn from other orders of civilization.  Yet none but a great master could, to produce a desired effect, have utilized every association which tradition afforded with the consummate skill observable in Milton’s poem.  He has been blamed for the introduction of St. Peter, on the ground of incongruity; but he has tradition on his side.  St. Peter, as we have already seen, figures, under the name of Pamphilus, in the eclogues of Petrarch, and his introduction by Milton is in nicest keeping with the spirit of the kind.  The whole poem, and indeed a great deal more, must stand or fall with the Pilot of the Galilean Lake, for to censure his introduction here is to condemn the whole pastoral tradition of three centuries, a judgement which may or may not be just, but which is not a criticism on Milton’s poem.  So again with the flowers that are to be strewn on the laureate hearse.  Three kinds of berries and eleven kinds of flowers are mentioned, and it has been pointed out with painful accuracy that nine of the latter would have been over, and none of the former ripe on August 11, when King was drowned; while all the flowers, with the exception of the amaranth, if it were of the true breed, would have been dead and rotten in November, when the poem was presumably written.  It would be foolish to quarrel with Milton on this point, since where all is imaginary such licence is as natural as the strictest botany; yet it must not be forgotten that it is just this disseverance from actuality that has made the eclogue the type of all that is frigid and artificial in literature.  The dissatisfaction felt by many with Lycidas was voiced by Dr. Johnson, when he wrote:  ’It is not to be considered the effusion of real passion, for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions....  Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief[134].’  This is so absolutely true, with regard to the present