The landscape-painting is that of the seventeenth century, absolutely true in broad effects, sometimes ill-defined and even inaccurate in minute details.

Some of these blemishes are terrible in nineteenth-century eyes, accustomed to the photography of our Brownings and Patmores.
Milton would probably have made light of them, and perhaps we owe him some thanks for thus practically refuting the heresy that inspiration implies infallibility.

Yet the poetry of his blindness abounds with proof that he had made excellent use of his eyes while he had them, and no part of his poetry wants instances of subtle and delicate observation worthy of the most scrutinizing modern:-- "Thee, chantress, oft the woods among, I woo, to hear thy evensong; And, missing thee, I walk unseen On the dry, smooth-shaven green." "The song of the nightingale," remarks Peacock, "ceases about the time the grass is mown." The charm, however, is less in such detached beauties, however exquisite, than in the condensed opulence--"every epithet a text for a canto," says Macaulay--and in the general impression of "plain living and high thinking," pursued in the midst of every charm of nature and every refinement of culture, combining the ideal of Horton with the ideal of Cambridge.
"Lycidas" is far more boldly conventional, not merely in the treatment of landscape, but in the general conception and machinery.

An initial effort of the imagination is required to feel with the poet; it is not wonderful that no such wing bore up the solid Johnson.

Talk of Milton and his fellow-collegian as shepherds! "We know that they never drove afield, and that they had no flocks to batten." There is, in fact, according to Johnson, neither nature nor truth nor art nor pathos in the poem, for all these things are inconsistent with the introduction of a shepherd of souls in the character of a shepherd of sheep.