Again, if we bear in mind Milton’s threefold canon, we must admit that his poetry lacks three great elements of power.  He is not Simple, Sensuous, or Passionate.  He is too essentially modern to be really simple.  He is the product of a high-strung civilization, and all its complicated crosscurrents of thought and feeling stir and perplex his verse.  Simplicity of style indeed he constantly aims at, and, by the aid of a fastidious culture, secures.  But his simplicity is, to use the distinction which he himself imported from France, rather akin to simplesse than to simplicite—­to the elaborated and artificial semblance than to the genuine quality.  He is not sensuous except in so far as the most refined and delicate appreciation of nature in all her forms and phases can be said to constitute a sensuous enjoyment.  And then, again, he is pre-eminently not passionate.  He is calm, balanced, self-controlled, sane, austere.  The very qualities which are his characteristic glory make passion impossible.

Another hindrance to his title as a great poet, is that he is not, and never could be, a poet of the multitude.  His verse lacks all popular fibre.  It is the delight of scholars, of philosophers, of men who live by silent introspection or quiet communing with nature.  But it is altogether remote from the stir and stress of popular life and struggle.  Then, again, his tone is profoundly, though not morbidly, melancholy, and this is fatal to popularity.  As he himself said, “The life of the people is such that in literature they require joy.”  But not only his thought, his very style, is anti-popular.  Much of his most elaborate work is in blank verse, and that in itself is a heavy draw-back.  Much also is in exotic and unaccustomed metres, which to the great bulk of English readers must always be more of a discipline than of a delight.  And, even when he wrote in our indigenous metres, his ear often played him false.  His rhymes are sometimes only true to the eye, and his lines are over-crowded with jerking monosyllables.  Let one glaring instance suffice—­

    Calm not life’s crown, though calm is well.

The sentiment is true and even profound; but the expression is surely rugged and jolting to the last degree; and there are many lines nearly as ineuphonious.  Here are some samples, collected by that fastidious critic, Mr. Frederic Harrison—­

    “The sandy spits, the shore-lock’d lakes.”

    “Could’st thou no better keep, O Abbey old?”

    “The strange-scrawl’d rocks, the lonely sky.”

These Mr. Harrison cites as proof that, “where Nature has withheld the ear for music, no labour and no art can supply the want.”  And I think that even a lover may add to the collection—­

    As the punt’s rope chops round.