Lycidas, written in 1637, is a tender monody on the loss of a friend named King, in the Irish Channel, in that year, and is a classical pastoral, tricked off in Italian garb.  What it loses in adherence to classic models and Italian taste, is more than made up by exquisite lines and felicitous phrases.  In it he calls fame “that last infirmity of noble mind.”  Perhaps he has nowhere written finer lines than these: 

So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed.  And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

Besides these, Milton wrote Latin poems with great vigor, if not with remarkable grace; and several Italian sonnets and poems, which have been much admired even by Italian critics.  The sonnet, if not of Italian origin, had been naturalized there when its birth was forgotten; and this practice in the Italian gave him that power to produce them in English which he afterward used with such effect.

PARADISE LOST.—­Having thus summarily disposed of his minor poems, each of which would have immortalized any other man, we come to that upon which his highest fame rests; which is familiarly known by men who have never read the others, and who are ignorant of his prose works; which is used as a parsing exercise in many schools, and which, as we have before hinted, has furnished Protestant pulpits with pictorial theology from that day to this.  It occupied him several years in the composition; from 1658, when Cromwell died, through the years of retirement and obscurity until 1667.  It came forth in an evil day, for the merry monarch was on the throne, and an irreligious court gave tone to public opinion.

The hardiest critic must approach the Paradise Lost with wonder and reverence.  What an imagination, and what a compass of imagination!  Now with the lost peers in Hell, his glowing fancy projects an empire almost as grand and glorious as that of God himself.  Now with undazzled, presumptuous gaze he stands face to face with the Almighty, and records the words falling from His lips; words which he has dared to place in the mouth of the Most High—­words at the utterance of which

... ambrosial fragrance filled
All heaven, and in the blessed spirits elect
Sense of new joy ineffable diffused.

Little wonder that in his further flight he does not shrink from colloquy with the Eternal Son—­in his theology not the equal of His Father—­or that he does not fear to describe the fearful battle between Christ with his angelic hosts against the kingdom of darkness: 

...  At his right hand victory
Sat eagle-winged:  beside him hung his bow
And quiver with three-bolted thunder stored.

* * * * *

...  Them unexpected joy surprised,
When the great ensign of Messiah blazed,
Aloft by angels borne his sign in heaven.