I will now, with your

either surprise or confusion.
permission, read it to you at length :—

'I went to sleep; and now I am refresh'd,
A strange refreshment: for I feel in me
An inexpressive lightness, and a sense
Of freedom, as I were at length myself,

And ne'er had been before. How still it is!

I hear no more the busy beat of time,

No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse;
Nor does one moment differ from the next.

I had a dream; yes;-some one softly said
"He's gone;" and then a sigh went round the room.
And then I surely heard a priestly voice
Cry "Subvenite;" and they knelt in prayer.
I seem to hear him still; but thin and low,
And fainter and more faint the accents come,
As at an ever-widening interval.

Ah! whence is this? What is this severance?

This silence pours a solitariness

Into the very essence of my soul;

And the deep rest, so soothing and so sweet,
Hath something too of sternness and of pain,
For it drives back my thoughts upon their spring
By a strange introversion, and perforce

I now begin to feed upon myself,

Because I have nought else to feed upon.

Am I alive or dead? I am not dead,
But in the body still; for I possess
A sort of confidence, which clings to me,
That each particular organ holds its place
As heretofore, combining with the rest
Into one symmetry, that wraps me round,
And makes me man; and surely I could move,

Did I but will it, every part of me.
And yet I cannot to my sense bring home
By very trial, that I have the power.
'Tis strange; I cannot stir a hand or foot,
I cannot make my fingers or my lips
By mutual pressure witness each to each,
Nor by the eyelid's instantaneous stroke
Assure myself I have a body still.
Nor do I know my very attitude,

Nor if I stand, or lie, or sit, or kneel.'

The rest of the work is much in the same key as the above: it is grave and subdued as to tone, somewhat bare of ornament, but everywhere weighty with thought. It It is written also with Dr. Newman's usual mastery over the English language, and moves along from the beginning to the end with a solemn harmony of its own. I am here referring to the blank verse; the speeches rather. The lyrical portions (with the exception of two, on which I shall touch by-and-by) are, in my judgment, less successful. The strains as they flow forth from the various ranks of angels are not, if I may use a somewhat pedantic word, differentiated by any intelligible gradations of feeling and of style, and, indeed, do not move me much more than those average hymns which people, who certainly are not angels yet, sing weekly in church. The interlocutory blasphemies of the demons are still worse.

I cannot help pronouncing them to be mean and repulsive.

I am aware that here there is room for a wide difference of opinion; I know that German critics of renown will tell you that the fiends of Dante or of Tasso are more to be admired than those of Paradise Lost.' But, though I do not wish to enter into any abstract discussions on the nature of good and evil, or on the metaphysical effects consequent on utter alienation from God, I yet feel that, poetically speaking, what they say is not true. I stand here in an English University, as an Englishman-an English Philistine, if you will-and profess myself, on that head at least, incurably Miltonic. I do not forget that another class of thinkers, very different from German critics, have arrived, by a separate road, at something like the same conclusion, and that our Miltonic Hades has been condemned by intelligent English divines. The silent valley where the lost

spirits sing

With notes angelical to many a harp;'

the intellectual pleasures reserved for them when they

reason high

'Of fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute;'

the noble palace, for which

'The blazing cressets, fed

With naphtha and asphaltus, yielded light

As from a sky,'

are thought of, as opening avenues to something more like comparative happiness, than is consistent with the appointed prison-house of misery and sin. Excellent men; therefore, speak of such fine imaginations as dangerous and deceitful; just as if these sublime visions of our great Puritan poet had lent some colour of plausibility to the hypothetical plans of that Yankee pedlar who, on being asked, when he returned from a business tour in Texas, what kind of a place it was, is said to have replied, Wall, stranger, if Hell and Texas both belonged to me, I should sell Texas.' Now, whatever may be the moral or theological force of these objections, upon me as a poetical critic, and nothing more, they do not tell with any weight. When I look at the question from my own point of view, I think that if you degrade one who was

'Of the first

If not the first Archangel,'

into an imp, you destroy, to our apprehensions, his personal identity at once; he is no longer the same being; no longer an antagonist powerful enough to

dispute with Michael; no longer the centre of the hostile system-a spiritual anti-sun, as it were, raying out that darkness which maintains to the end its fierce though unequal battle against the immeasurable light.

Nay, even if Milton had never existed, I should still consider the fiendish shapes of the Inferno,' who are like nothing so much as the harsh ushers and malignant young bullies of an ill-conducted private school, to be wanting altogether in dignity and effect.

I sympathise with both clauses of Wordsworth's noble line

Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains; '

and therefore I turn away, not without a sense of relief, from Dr. Newman's gibbering devils, to the melancholy grandeur with which Byron, in his 'Heaven and Earth,' reproduces our Miltonic idea of a fallen spirit:

'Son of the saved,

When thou and thine have braved

The wide and warring element,

Shall thou and thine be happy? No!

Thy new world and new race shall be of woe.

奖

And art thou not ashamed

Thus to survive,

And eat, and drink, and wive,

With a base heart so far subdued and tamed
As even to hear this wide destruction named?