Sublimity and imagination are infrequent; what we have most commonly to admire are grace, ease, polish, and felicitous phrases rather concise in expression than weighty with matter.

Of these merits the elegies to his friend Diodati, and the lines addressed to his father and to Manso, are admirable examples.

The "Epitaphium Damonis" is in a higher strain, and we shall have to recur to it.
Except for his formal incorporation with the University of Oxford, by proceeding M.A.there in 1635, and the death of his mother on April 3, 1637, Milton's life during his residence at Horton, as known to us, is entirely in his writings.

These comprise the "Sonnet to the Nightingale," "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," all probably written in 1633; "Arcades," probably, and "Comus" certainly written in 1634; "Lycidas" in 1637.

The first three only are, or seem to be, spontaneous overflowings of the poetic mind: the others are composed in response to external invitations, and in two instances it is these which stand highest in poetic desert.