" Again, in Milton's "Lycidas," i. 163 "Look homeward, angel, now and melt with ruth, And, O ye Dolphins, waft the helpless youth.

One of these tributes, especially, waswe are informed by vague traditionperfectly resplendent for its imagery and diction; contesting seriously, we are assured, the palm, with Homer, Virgil and our Milton; though unlike bright Patroclus and the peerless Lycidas, the subject of the eulogy had not suffered change when it was penned.

In "Lycidas," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," "Arcades," "Comus," and a few "Sonnets," we have the poetic results of this retirement at Horton,few, indeed, but the most perfect of their kind that our literature has recorded.

In the next poem, "Lycidas," a pastoral elegy written in 1637, and the last of his Horton poems, Milton is no longer the inheritor of the old age, but the prophet of a new.

In its exquisite finish and exhaustless imagery "Lycidas" surpasses most of the poetry of what is often called the pagan Renaissance.

Paradise Lost, books 1-2, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and selected Sonnets,all in Standard English Classics; same poems, more or less complete, in various other series; Areopagitica and Treatise on Education, selections, in Manly's English Prose, or Areopagitica in Arber's English Reprints, Clarendon Press Series, Morley's Universal Library, etc. Minor Poets.

Why is "Lycidas" often put at the summit of English lyrical poetry?

Four remarkable poems were written during his years of studious leisure at Horton,L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas.

] Lycidas, one of the world's great elegies, was written on the death of Milton's classmate, Edward King.

Mark Pattison, one of Milton's biographers, says: "In Lycidas we have reached the high-water mark of English poesy and of Milton's own production.

A line in Lycidas says: "He touched the tender stops of various quills," and this may be said of Milton.

There are the dirge notes in Lycidas; the sights, sounds, and odors of the country, in L'Allegro; the delights of "the studious cloister's pale," in Il Penseroso; the impelling presence of his "great Task-Master," in the sonnets.

His greatest poems are L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, and Paradise Lost.

L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas (American Book Company's Eclectic English Classics, 20 cents), and Paradise Lost, Books I. and II.

Are there qualities in Lycidas that justify calling it "the high-water mark" of English lyrical poetry?

One cannot think of the two names together without calling to mind the "lean and flashy songs" and "scrannel pipes of wretched straw" in Lycidas.

Milton, Lycidas (1638).

Lycidas, in like manner, was the perfection of the Elizabethan pastoral elegy.

In technical quality Lycidas is the most wonderful of all Milton's poems.

309; enthusiasm of mind, solemn, iii. 122, n. 2; to go with Captain Cook, iii. 7; to go to the wall of China, iii. 269; feudal, iii. 178; v. 223; genealogical, v. 379; envy of Dundas's success, ii. 160, n. 1; Epistle from Menalcas to Lycidas, i. 383, n. 3; Essays, his, iv. 179; Essence of the Douglas Cause, ii. 230, n. 1; Essex Head Club, member of the, iv. 254, n. 2; estate, income of his, iv.

So just is the beautiful reflexion of Milton in his Lycidas; Fame is the spur, that the clear spirit doth raise, (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon, when we hops to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind fury with th' abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life.

Milton's Lycidas and Browne's Britannia's Pastorals VII.

The two poems we have now to consider were, in all probability, written within a short while of one another, and the second anticipated by more than three years the composition of Lycidas.

It is not, however, on account of these that Comus has been commonly assigned to the same category as the Faithful Shepherdess and Lycidas, but rather because its whole tone, its mode, one might almost say, is essentially pastoral, and because it is directly dependent upon previous pastoral work.

This is no less true of the decasyllabic verse, when compared with the full sonority of Lycidas, than of the shorter measures.