The wind blows cold, While the _mor_-ning doth unfold.
Milton's _Comus_, though not equal throughout to the _Faithful Shepherdess_ in descriptive judgment (for it talks of "groves of myrrh and cinnamon" on the banks of a British river), is altogether a finer poem, and a far better recommendation of chastity. Indeed, it might rather have been called _Castitas_ than _Comus_; for _Comus_ has little justice done to his powers of temptation. Perhaps Fletcher's failure in recommending chastity suggested the hope of surpassing him to Milton. His emulation of particular passages in the _Faithful Shepherdess_, particularly on that subject, has been noticed by the commentators. But _Comus_ is a mask, not a pastoral. It can hardly even be called a pastoral mask; for the shepherd is the least person in it; and though the Italians identify the pastoral with the sylvan drama, or fable transacted in the woods, which are the scene of action in _Comus_, the reader feels that the woods have really almost as little to do with it as the fields;--that the moral, in fact, is all in all; which is the reason why nobody takes very heartily to the subject, especially as Milton acts in morals like a kind of solemn partisan, and does not run, like Shakspeare, the whole circle of humanity in arguing his question.
Milton's only real pastoral (with the exception of the country part of the _Allegro_) is his allegorical monody on the death of his friend King,--the _Lycidas_; and a beautiful one it is, though Dr. Johnson, in his one-sided misapplication of a right principle, laughed at grief which departs from the ordinary phases of life, and which talks of nymphs and river-gods, and "satyrs with cloven heel." "Grief," he said, "does not talk of such things;" to which Warton said very truly, "But Poetry does;" and he might have added (still more literally than he puts it), that Grief does so too, when it is the grief of one young poet mourning for another. Johnson says that Milton and his friend were not "nursed on the same hill," as represented in _Lycidas_; and that they did not "feed the same flock," &c. But they were, and they did. They were nursed on the same hill of Arcady, and fed the same flock of the ideal pastoral life; and very grievous it was for them to be torn asunder, to be deprived by death of their mutual delight in Theocritus, and Virgil, and Spenser, the beloved haunts of their minds, things which it has agonized friends and poets to be torn away from, both before and since the time of Milton, however little they may have been cared for by dear, good, dictatorial, purblind, un-ideal Dr. Johnson, whose world, though it was a wit's and a sage's world too, was not the universal and still sager world of the poet, but made up (exclusively) of the Strand, hypochondria, charity, bigotry, wit, argument, and a good dinner;--a pretty region, but not the green as _well_ as smoky world of Nature and Shakspeare.