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Updated: June 7, 2025
Its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion, and in his happiest state the opium-eater can not present himself in the character of L'Allegro; even then he speaks and thinks as becomes Il Penseroso.
The fame of the author of Paradise Lost has overshadowed that of the author of L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas. Yet had Paradise Lost never been written, these three poems, with Comus, would have sufficed to place their author in a class apart, and above all those who had used the English language for poetical purposes before him.
His countenance was penseroso when in repose, and allegro in action, and these graces clung to him even in life's winter, like the flower at the base of the glacier. Among the varied elements which constituted Irving's popularity, one of them might have been the beauty of his name, whose secret is revealed by the laws of prosody.
Admit that the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton are not without merit; but repay yourself for this concession, by reprinting at length the two poems on the University Carrier! As a fair specimen of his Sonnets, quote and, as characteristic of his rhythm and metre, cite his literal translation of the first and second Psalm!
"Or let my lamp at midnight hour Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, Or thrice-great Hermes, and unsphere The spirit of Plato." Milton. Il Penseroso.
Cassiopeia was an Aethiopian, and consequently, in spite of her boasted beauty, black; at least so Milton seems to have thought, who alludes to this story in his Penseroso, where he addresses Melancholy as the " goddess, sage and holy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, And, therefore, to our weaker view O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue.
"Or let my lamp at midnight hour Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, Or thrice-great Hermes, and unsphere The spirit of Plato." Milton. Il Penseroso.
Milton's tenderness imprints ideas as graceful as Guido's Madonnas: and the "Allegro," "Penseroso," and "Comus" might be denominated from the three Graces; as the Italians gave similar titles to two or three of Petrarch's best sonnets.
The artist's ideal is the 'Penseroso, and in order to recognize the highly developed man he must be furnished with a proof of his identity, so that the meaning of the creature may not be lost to sight for a moment." "You may put it in the joking way, but I really mean it. I don't forget how much of the animal is still in us. Of course one wants relaxation.
The real cause of the modern vagueness is rather to be found in shallow and unsound culture, and in that inability, or carelessness about seeing any object clearly, which besets our poets just now; as the cause of antique clearness lies in the nobler and healthier manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of thought, the sounder philosophic and critical training which enabled Spenser and Milton to draw up a state paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics, with the same manful possession of their subject which gives grace and completeness to the Penseroso or the Epithalmion.
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