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I can sit out anything from 'Here We Are Again' to 'Samson Agonistes. To be frank, I rather liked 'Samson': it does one's ears good to listen to that austere, delicate English." "How long would these take to polish one off?" "Ten or twelve hours, chiefly in the form of a hoop. No, Berns, I can't recommend them."

Where, as in Milton's two epics, and Samson Agonistes, the personages are all supernatural or heroic, there is no room for the employment of knowledge of the world. Had Milton written comedy, like Moliere, he might have said with Moliere after he had been introduced at court, "Je n'ai plus que faire d'etudier Plaute et Terence; je n'ai qu'a etudier le monde."

We could not keep the peace with a man who should put forward claims to taste and yet depreciate the choruses in SAMSON AGONISTES; but, I think, we may shake hands with one who sees no more in Walt Whitman's volume, from a literary point of view, than a farrago of incompetent essays in a wrong direction. That may not be at all our own opinion.

The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Browning notes his But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's noble lines on blindness in Samson Agonistes have had much to do, undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets.

Samson Agonistes contains scarcely any of the glorious imagery of Milton's earlier poems. It has been called "the most unadorned poem that can be found." Variety in his Early Work. A line in Lycidas says: "He touched the tender stops of various quills," and this may be said of Milton. His early poems show great variety.

Probably he may recommend to you the part of the Lady in Comus; and I only hope his own admiration of John Milton will not induce him to undertake the part of Samson Agonistes, and blow up this old house with execration, or pull it down in wrath about our ears."

For months before I began The Captive I read but three books read them and brooded over them, all day and all night. They were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound, and Samson Agonistes. You sit with these books, and time and space "to nothingness do sink." There looms up before you like a bare mountain in its majesty the great elemental world-fact, the death-grapple of the will with circumstance.

There are the Victors in the intellectual wrestlings of the world, the thinkers, poets, sages; the Victors in great sorrows, who conquer the savage pain of heart and desolation of spirit which arise from heroic human grief, Oedipus and Antigone, Iphigenia, Perseus, Prometheus, King Lear, Samson Agonistes, Job, and David in his penitential psalm.

And the end of Samson Agonistes is as the end of Milton's own life. Awaited in calm dignity, as a Roman soldier might wait for Caesar's word, Death has claimed its own. But let not the "daughters of the uncircumsized" triumph! Grandeur and nobility, beauty and heroism, live still; and while these live, what matter though our bravest and our fairest perish?

Are there any Puritan ideals in "Comus"? Why is "Lycidas" often put at the summit of English lyrical poetry? Give the main idea or argument of Paradise Lost. What are the chief qualities of the poem? Describe in outline Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. What personal element entered into the latter? What quality strikes you most forcibly in Milton's poetry?