“Lycidas” is far more boldly conventional, not merely in the treatment of landscape, but in the general conception and machinery.  An initial effort of the imagination is required to feel with the poet; it is not wonderful that no such wing bore up the solid Johnson.  Talk of Milton and his fellow-collegian as shepherds!  “We know that they never drove afield, and that they had no flocks to batten.”  There is, in fact, according to Johnson, neither nature nor truth nor art nor pathos in the poem, for all these things are inconsistent with the introduction of a shepherd of souls in the character of a shepherd of sheep.  A nineteenth-century reader, it may be hoped, finds no more difficulty in idealizing Edward King as a shepherd than in personifying the ocean calm as “sleek Panope and all her sisters,” which, to be sure, may have been a trouble to Johnson.  If, however, Johnson is deplorably prosaic, neither can we agree with Pattison that “in ‘Lycidas’ we have reached the high-water mark of English Poesy and of Milton’s own production.”  Its innumerable beauties are rather exquisite than magnificent.  It is an elegy, and cannot, therefore, rank as high as an equally consummate example of epic, lyric, or dramatic art.  Even as elegy it is surpassed by the other great English masterpiece, “Adonais,” in fire and grandeur.  There is no incongruity in “Adonais” like the introduction of “the pilot of the Galilean lake”; its invective and indignation pour naturally out of the subject; their expression is not, as in “Lycidas,” a splendid excrescence.  There is no such example of sustained eloquence in “Lycidas” as the seven concluding stanzas of “Adonais” beginning, “Go thou to Rome.”  But the balance is redressed by the fact that the beauties of “Adonais” are the inimitable.  Shelley’s eloquence is even too splendid for elegy.  It wants the dainty thrills and tremors of subtle versification, and the witcheries of verbal magic in which “Lycidas” is so rich—­“the opening eyelids of the morn;” “smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds;” Camus’s garment, “inwrought with figures dim;” “the great vision of the guarded mount;” “the tender stops of various quills;” “with eager thought warbling his Doric lay.”  It will be noticed that these exquisite phrases have little to do with Lycidas himself, and it is a fact not to be ignored, that though Milton and Shelley doubtless felt more deeply than Dryden when he composed his scarcely inferior threnody on Anne Killegrew, whom he had never seen, both might have found subjects of grief that touched them more nearly.  Shelley tells us frankly that “in another’s woe he wept his own.”  We cannot doubt of whom Milton was thinking when he wrote: 

   “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,
    (That last infirmity of noble mind)
    To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
    But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
    And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
    Comes the blind Fury with