23 Return, Alpheus," &c.-How much more sweet and Christian Paganism itself sounds, after those threats of religious violence! The "two-handed engine" is supposed to mean the axe preparing for poor, weak, violent Laud! Milton was now beginning to feel the sectarian influence of his father; one, unfortunately, of a sullen and unpoetical sort. 24" Honied showers.”—There is an awkwardness of construction between this and the preceding line which hurts the beautiful idea of the flowers "sucking the honied showers," by seeming to attribute the suction to their "eyes." eyes." There might, indeed, be learned allowance for such an ellipsis; and we hardly know where to find the proper noun substantive or predicate for the verb, if it be not so; but the image is terribly spoilt by it. 25 “Glowing violet."- Why "glowing?" The pansy (heart's-ease) "freak'd with jet" is exquisite; equally true to letter and spirit. 26"The great Vision of the guarded Mount.”- This is the Archangel Michael, the guardian of seamen, sitting on the Mount off the coast of Cornwall known by his name, and looking towards the coast of Gallicia. It is rather surprising that Milton, with his angelical tendencies, did not take the opportunity of saying more of him. But the line is a grand one. COMUS THE SORCERER. THYRSIS tells the Brothers of a Lady, that their Sister has fallen into the hands of the Sorcerer COMUS, dwelling in a wood. Within the navel of this hideous wood, By sly enticement gives his baneful cup, With many murmurs mix'd, whose pleasing poison In their obscurèd haunts of inmost bowers; And fill'd the air with barbarous dissonance; Still to be so displac'd. I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul But further know I not. Sec. Br. O night, and shades! How are ye join'd with hell in triple knot Against the unarmed weakness of one virgin, Lean on it safely; not a period Shall be unsaid for me: against the threats Of malice, or of sorcery, or that power Which erring men call chance, this I hold firm ;- And mix no more with goodness; when at last, And earth's base built on stubble. 27 “The chewing flocks, &c.”—“The supper of the sheep," says Warton, "is from a beautiful comparison in Spenser,— As gentle shepherd, in sweet eventide When ruddy Phoebus gins to welk (decline) in west, High on a hill, his flock to viewen wide, Marks which do bite their hasty supper best." Faerie Queene, i. s. 23. "Chewing flocks" is good, but not equal to "biting their hasty supper." It is hardly dramatical, too, in the speaker to stop to notice the sweetness and dewiness of the sheep's grass, while he had a story to tell, and one of agitating interest to his hearers. COLERIDGE, BORN, 1773,-DIED, 1834. COLERIDGE lived in the most extraordinary and agitated period of modern history; and to a certain extent he was so mixed up with its controversies, that he was at one time taken for nothing but an apostate republican, and at another for a dreaming theosophist. The truth is, that both his politics and theosophy were at the mercy of a discursive genius, intellectually bold but educationally timid, which, anxious, or rather willing, to bring conviction and speculation together, mooting all points as it went, and throwing the subtlest glancing lights on many, ended in satisfying nobody, and concluding nothing. Charles Lamb said of him, that he had "the art of making the unintelligible appear intelligible." He was the finest dreamer, the most eloquent talker, and the most original thinker of his day; but for want of complexional energy, did nothing with all the vast prose part of his mind but help the Germans to |