If, as I
have said, Milton reads books first and nature afterwards, it is not
to test nature by his books, but to learn from both. He is learning
not books, but from books. All he reads, sees, hears, is to him but
nutriment for the soul. He is making himself. Man is to him the
highest object; nature is subordinate to man, not only in its more
vulgar uses, but as an excitant of fine emotion. He is not concerned
to register the facts and phenomena of nature, but to convey the
impressions they make on a sensitive soul. The external forms of
things are to be presented to us as transformed through the heart and
mind of the poet. The moon is endowed with life and will, "stooping",
"riding", "wand'ring", "bowing her head", not as a frigid
personification, and because the ancient poets so personified her, but
by communication to her of the intense agitation which the nocturnal
spectacle rouses in the poet's own breast.
I have sometimes read that these two idylls are "masterpieces of
description". Other critics will ask if in the scenery of _L'Allegro_
and _Il Penseroso_ Milton has described the country about Horton, in
Bucks, or that about Forest Hill, in Oxfordshire; and will object that
the Chiltern Hills are not high enough for clouds to rest upon their
top, much less upon their breast.
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