48 The Study of Poetry
great, became in a wider sense national. The verses of
Ariosto andTasso, court poetry written for a highly-educated
aristocratic circle, were sung by Venetian gondoliers and
Lombard vine-dressers, as those of Pindar had been sung in
ancient Greece by fishermen, and as those of Virgil are
found scrawled on street walls in Pompeii. In England,
Milton, a poet of profound learning and extraordinary tech-
nical skill, was read and appreciated not only by scholars or
artists, but widely among a people whose study of the Bible
had introduced them to literature and taught them in some
measure to appreciate poetry. His genius penetrated and
inspired the Puritan democracy; and though his own repub-
licanism was of a severely aristocratic type, he may be called
in some sense the source of republican poetry. For, once
poetry had taken to do with the fate and destiny of man-
kind itself, it had to concern itself with the life and labour
of the people as the main factor in human affairs. It found
the reflection of the kingdom of God in the commonwealth
of mankind. The freedom of God’s ransomed drew with
it as its consequence a freedom which was of this world.
The equality of men before God bore with it their equality
of rights and dignity here. The brotherhood of all God’s
children led on to the doctrine of a true fraternity, not only
religious but political and social likewise, linking together all
members of the human race.
The eighteenth century, that great germinal age of the
human spirit, the age in which not only the American Com-
monwealth but the modern world was created, was one in
which poetry held itself back. It was waiting for the shap-
ing of the new structure of life: the task lay before it of
fashioning that structure into new imaginative patterns, and
giving it thereby organic form and vital interpretation. To-
wards the end of the century this preliminary work was well