A period of a century and a half
was to elapse before poetry in England seemed, in Wordsworth's _Ode
on Immortality_ (1807), to be rising again towards the level of
inspiration which it had once attained in _Lycidas_. And in the
development of the Miltonic genius this wonderful dirge marks the
culminating point. As the twin idylls of 1632 show a great advance
upon the _Ode on the Nativity_ (1629), the growth of the poetic mind
during the five years which follow 1632 is registered in _Lycidas_.
Like the _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, _Lycidas_ is laid out on the
lines of the accepted pastoral fiction; like them it offers exquisite
touches of idealised rural life. But _Lycidas_ opens up a deeper vein
of feeling, a patriot passion so vehement and dangerous, that, like
that which stirred the Hebrew prophet, it is compelled to veil itself
from power, or from sympathy, in utterance made purposely enigmatical.
The passage which begins "Last came and last did go", raises in us a
thrill of awe-struck expectation which. I can only compare with that
excited by the Cassandra of Aeschylus's _Agamemnon_. For the reader to
feel this, he must have present in memory the circumstances of England
in 1637.
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