JOHN MILTON ea 
in ancient literature could have worked under such 
conditions without losing something of the freedom 
and freshness of his thought. The pastoral form was 
admirably adapted to Milton’s purpose; in that com- 
pletely artificial and impossible world of shepherds and 
shepherdesses, nymphs and fauns, it was easy to keep 
the utterance of strong emotion subservient to the 
supreme artistic end of beauty for its own sake. 
Things could be said, too, which, if explicitly said of 
certain persons living in England in 1637, would not 
be endured. The occasion of the poem was the death 
of Edward King, a young clergyman who had been 
Milton’s friend and fellow-student at Cambridge. Mr. 
King was drowned in a shipwreck on the Irish Sea, in 
crossing from Chester to Dublin; and his sorrowing 
friends in Cambridge made up an album of thirty-six 
original poems in Greek, Latin, and English, to be 
printed as a memorial volume. Most of the poems 
were of the crude, trashy sort usually found in such 
collections. One of them exclaims: — 
“To drown this little world! Could God forget 
His covenant which in the clouds he set? 
Where was the bow? — but back, my Muse, from hence, 
Tis not for thee to question Providence,” etc. 
Another says : — 
““ Religion was but the position 
Of his own judgment: ‘Truth to him alone 
Stood naked ; he strung the Art’s chain and knit the ends, 
And made divine and human learning friends,” etc. 
A third says: — 
“Weep forth your tears, then ; pour out all your tide ; 
All waters are pernicious since King died.” 
