The initial idea of the twin poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, may be traced with considerable probability to a poem prefixed to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a book which is in the list of Milton's reading at Horton. The verses are entitled "The Author's Abstract of Melancholy; or, A Dialogue Between Pleasure and Pain" The following extracts will give a fair idea of them:

"When I go musing all alone,

Thinking of divers things foreknown,
When I build castles in the air,
Void of sorrow, void of fear,
Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet,

When to myself I act and smile,
With pleasing thoughts the time beguile,
By a brookside or wood so green,
Unheard, unsought for, and unseen,
Methinks I hear, methinks I see,
Sweet music, wondrous melody,
Towns, palaces, and cities fine;

Here now, then there, the world is mine:
Rare beauties, gallant ladies, shine,
Whate'er is lovely or divine.
All other joys to this are folly;
Nought so sweet as Melancholy."

An idea so congenial as this to Milton's contemplative nature, and so imperfectly expressed, would naturally tease his artistic fancy, especially when the seclusion of country life gave him ample opportunity to taste the pleasures which Burton celebrates. It is not improbable that he found a further stimulus in a pretty song in Beaumont and Fletcher's play entitled Nice Valour. The play was not published, it is true, until 1647, fifteen years after the probable date of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso; but as Francis Beaumont died in 1616,

Fountain heads and pathless groves,
Places which pale passion loves;
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
Are warmly housed, save bats and owls.
A midnight bell, a parting groan,
These are the sounds we feed upon.

Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley; Nothing's so dainty-sweet as lovely Melancholy."

The scheme of contrasts in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso may also have been suggested by Burton's verses; for he gives, as a running antithesis to the pleasures of the mild contemplative type of melancholy, alternate verses dealing with the darker aspects of that mood of mind, ending with the emphatic refrain, —

"All my griefs to this are jolly,

None so damned as Melancholy." Milton has lifted this contrast to the other side of the scale, placing over against the sweetness of contemplation the sweetness of frank and open mirth and delight in the outward aspects of things.

In the case of vital literature, however, such external indications of origin go at best a very little way toward explaining

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its genesis. The poems noted above undoubtedly furnished an inceptive hint, and Marlowe's famous lyric, "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love," supplied a line or two. Of more interest to consider are the subjective conditions antecedent to or accompanying the production of the poem. It was written in a transition period of the author's life, when the exuberance of youth was giving way to the soberness of manhood, and when, too, the Elizabethan influences in the immediate world about him

were rapidly falling back before the advancing shadow of Puritanism. We are apt to think of Milton only in his grimmer shape, after his character had hardened under the pressure of his gigantic will. One has but to read, however, among the early Latin poems, the first and the seventh elegies and the verses "On the Approach of Spring" (In Adventum Veris), to understand that his veins in youth were full of as heady a wine as the most radical humanist could wish for him. The "Sonnet to the Nightingale," ushering in his Horton period, is a pure troubadour song, eloquent of the longing for joy which is the intolerable obsession of youth. All these centrifugal tendencies, urging him out to seek the "joy in widest commonalty spread," were opposed by constantly growing instincts toward abstraction from the world of sense, a retiring upon self to find the elements of a more visionary and abiding happiness.

L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are a kind of summing up of these two possible attitudes toward life. Milton was not prepared to champion either attitude in a partisan spirit. He felt the appeal of both in his own nature; they were the two sides of a balanced life. Yet he must have recognized the practical impossibility of combining them in their perfect fullness, and have felt a certain personal satisfaction in setting forth clearly, though in a poetic guise, the rational claims of each upon his sympathy. The problem, if such it can be called, was

of course still rather remote and unreal: he did not foresee the solution which circumstance was soon to thrust upon him, in the shape of a life lived for ideal ends through days of dusty publicity.

A good deal of discussion on the part of commentators has followed Professor Masson's remark that the two poems each narrate the events of "an ideal day, a day of twelve hours." A brief analysis will make the points of the discussion clear.

L'Allegro begins, after the preliminary verses in banishment of Melancholy and the invocation of Mirth and her companions, with the lark's song at dawn. Then follow, in swift succession, typical glimpses of morning life in the country, the crowing of the cock, the baying of hounds, and the winding of the hunter's horn, the milkmaid singing across the sunrise fields, the shepherd counting his sheep as they come from the fold. Through these sights and sounds the poet passes, himself "not unseen," i. e., greeted and greeting, toward the hillock whence he can view "the great sun begin his state." The landscape description which follows, of mountains, meadows, brooks, and battlemented towers, is without indication of the time of day; but the picture of Corydon and Thyrsis at their dinner of herbs apprises us that the chronological order is still adhered to. The merry-making on the green of some "upland hamlet," whither the poet now strays, may very well fall in the late afternoon, and the nut brown ale and the goblin tales by the fire bring the "ideal day to a close. Up to this point, only one circumstance disturbs the even development of the theme, namely, the mention of the "hoar hill on which the hunters are heard, - an autumnal detail irreconcilable with the midsummer picture.

Here, however, the development changes abruptly; and with the words,

"Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men,"

the mind is led away to the more splendid

spectacles of court and theatre, the pageantry of princely marriages, with their accompaniment of masques and processions, or to such survivals of the mediæval tournaments and courts of love as England could show under the Stuarts. It would seem to be a forcing of the "ideal day theory of the poem to take this, not literally - as an abrupt transfer of the scene to the city, where L'Allegro, or "the cheerful man," is an eye-witness of these high festivities, but fancifully, as something which he reads about after he has left the company of rustic story-tellers creeping to bed, and has himself retired to end his evening with his books. Either interpretation is possible, however, and the reader :- free to choose for himself. It may perhaps strengthen the latter interpretation to notice that this indication, if such it is, of the kind of reading in which L'Allegro delights, is supplemented by a description of the kind of music which especially appeals to him, songs full of lively trills and cadenzas, as opposed to the sylvan dreammusic, the organ peal, and the solemn anthem, which Il Penseroso loves.

The second poem answers the first, part to part. There is the preliminary banish ing of Joy, in the same measure of alternate pentameters and trimeters, followed by an invocation of Melancholy with her appropriate train of attendants. The "ideal day" opens here at evening. Il Penseroso, "the meditative man," listens to the nightingale in the woods, hears the curfew roll across the water to the headland where he stands, or walks across the mowed hayfields watching the midnight moon. Here, however, the temporal sequence breaks down altogether; for he is one moment in the city listening to the call of the nightwatch, and the next in the lonely tower of a castle or moated grange, deep in Plato and Hermes Trismegistus. It is an incidental refutation of the more fanciful interpretation of the lines in L'Allegro beginning, "Towered cities please us then," that

here, in the midnight studies of Il Penseroso, Milton gives prominence to romantic tales of chivalry which would be identical in mood with the sights which L'Allegro describes, provided both were seen only with the eye of fancy.

When the dawn comes it is ushered in, not with bird songs and cock crow, but with gusty winds and the sound of dripping eaves. The poet walks abroad, but not to note the bustle of the waking world, much less to mingle in it. Instead, he buries himself in a twilight grove, where the murmur of bees and waters invite to slumber. For him the airy stream of portraiture which dream displays is livelier than the vision of external fact. When he wakes, it is to seek the places where life comes nearest to dream, the cloister and the cathedral. The lines beginning,

"But let my due feet never fail

To walk the studious cloister's pale,"

coming as they do in symmetrical contrast with the disputed passage of the Allegro,

"Towered cities please us then," etc., prove by implication that the latter passage is to be taken literally. If anything more were needed to invalidate the strict application of the "ideal day" theory of the structure of the two poems, it would be supplied by the concluding passage of the Penseroso, where the poet looks forward to old age in a forest hermitage.

The result of the analysis seems to be that Milton did strive to give the poems continuity of development by following in some measure the typical happenings of twenty-four hours in two contrasted lives, or rather in two contrasted moods of a single life; but that he left himself perfectly free to dispense with this framework wherever by so doing he could widen the meaning or intensify the beauty of his theme.

Milton was not a minute observer of na-~ ture. He does not picture her outward