"He touched the tender stops of various quills,"
and this may be said of Milton. His early poems show great variety. 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.
Although Milton is noted for his seriousness and sublimity, we must not be blind to the fact that his minor poems show great delicacy of touch. The epilogue of the Spirit at the end of _Comus_ is an instance of exquisite airy fancy passing into noble imagination at the close. In 1638 Sir Henry Wotton wrote to Milton this intelligent criticism of _Comus_: "I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our language _Ipsa mollities_."
Limitations.--In giving attention to Milton's variety, we should not forget that when we judge him by Elizabethan standards his limitations are apparent. As varied as are his excellences, his range is far narrower than Shakespeare's. He has little sense of humor and less sympathy with human life than either Shakespeare or Burns. Milton became acquainted with flowers through the medium of a book before he noticed them in the fields. Consequently, in speaking of flowers and birds, he sometimes makes those mistakes to which the bookish man is more prone than the child who first hears the story of Nature from her own lips. Unlike Shakespeare and Burns, Milton had the misfortune to spend his childhood in a large city. Again, while increasing age seemed to impose no limitations on Shakespeare's genius, his touch being as delicate in _The Tempest_ as in his first plays, Milton's style, on the other hand, grew frigid and devoid of imagery toward the end of his life.
Sublimity.--The most striking characteristic of Milton's poetry is sublimity, which consists, first, in the subject matter. In the opening lines of _Paradise Lost_ he speaks of his "adventurous song"--
"That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."