Join voices all ye living Souls. Ye Birds,
That, singing, up to Heaven-gate ascend,
Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise.
Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk
The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep,
Witness if I be silent, morn or even,
To hill or valley, fountain, or fresh shade,
Made vocal by my song, and taught his praise.
This note of high imaginative tension is persistent throughout the poem,
and that it should be so masterfully sustained is in itself cause for
delighted admiration. But to be constant in a virtue is not to enhance
its quality. Superbly furnished as _Paradise Lost_ is with this
imaginative beauty, the beauty is as rich and unquestionable in the few
pages of _Lycidas_; there is less of it, that is all. And who shall
say that it is less ecstatic or less perfect in the little orison to Saint
Ben? You may prefer Milton's manner, but then you may, with equal reason,
prefer Herrick's, being grateful for what Keats announced to be truth, in
whatever shape you may find it. In any case we cannot, on this ground,
assign a lower place to the poet who could order those words "religion's,"
"Saint Ben," "Psalter" and the rest of them, with such inspired good
fortune.
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