Following the pagan came the Christian Renaissance born of the Reformation, a new birth in harmony with the genius of the Germanic peoples. It must be admitted that the Reformation entered England by a side door. It was established when Henry VIII. permitted the English Bible to be published. England had her book. Hence have sprung much of the English language and half of the English manners; to this day the country is Biblical. After the Bible the book most widely-read in England is the Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. It is a manual of devotion for the use of simple folk. In it we hear a man of the people speaking to the people, who would render intelligible to all the terrible doctrine of damnation and salvation. Allegory is natural to Bunyan. He employs it from necessity. He only grasps truth when it is made simple by images. His work is allegorical, that it may be intelligible. Bunyan is a poet because he is a child. He has the freedom, the tone, the ease, the clearness of Homer; he is as close to Homer as an Anabaptist tinker could be to a heroic singer. He and Milton survived as the two last poets of the Reformation, oppressed and insulted, but their work continues without noise, for the ideal they raised was, after all, that which the time suggested and the race demanded.
John Milton was not one of those fevered souls whose rapture takes them by fits, and whose inquietude condemns them to paint the contradictions of passion. His mind was lucid, his imagination limited. He does not create souls but constructs arguments. Emotions and arguments are arranged beneath a unique sentiment, that of the sublime, and the broad river of lyric poetry streams from him with even flow, splendid as a cloth of gold.
Against external fluctuations he found a refuge in himself; and the ideal city which he had built in his soul endured impregnable to all assaults. He believed in the sublime with the whole force of his nature, and the whole authority of his logic. When after a generous education he returned from his travels he threw himself into the strife of the times heartily, armed with logic, indignation and learning, and protected by conviction and conscience. I have before me the formidable volume in which his prose works were collected. What a book! The chairs creak when you place it upon them. How we cannot fix our attention on the same point for a page at a time. We require manageable ideas; we have disused the big two-handed sword of our forefathers. If Michael Angelo's prophets could speak, it would be in Milton's style. Overloaded with ornaments, infinitely prolonged, these periods are triumphant choruses of angelic Alleluias sung by deep voices to the accompaniment of ten thousand harps of gold. But is he truly a prose-writer? Entangled dialectics, a heavy and awkward mind, fanatical and ferocious provincialism, the blast and temerities of implacable passion, the sublimity of religious and lyric exaltation--we do not recognize in these features a man born to explain, persuade, and prove.