"The still morn" is perfection; the greyness,
also, is a veritable touch under certain cloudy
conditions; but why must the morn have
"sandals"? Of course, Milton's object was to
give you the idea of a pilgrim issuing forth on
his pious journey; but is not the coming of the
divine mystery of light worth a whole army of
pilgrims—immeasurably more interesting and
more sacred?

A small poet in comparison with Milton—
Marston, the dramatist—has two lines in one of
his plays which say exactly what is wanted, and
no more:

  Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn, that flakes
  With silver tincture the east verge of heaven?

—though the same poet, in another place, falls
back upon the old impersonations:

           See! the dapple coursers of the morn
   Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs,
   And chase it through the sky.

The image here introduced is very pretty in
itself; but it is grossly inapplicable to the
thing which it professes to describe. Milton's
"Aurora's fan" is an excessive instance of bad
taste; but his phrase, " the dawning hills," is
equally fine and true. And Shakespeare, in
Hamlet, strikes off a circumstance incidental to
morning, in a passage of noble simplicity and
exquisite modulation:

     The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
     And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire.

Very faithful also, to a certain kind of dawn,
is that bit in Much Ado about Nothing:

              And look! the gentle day
     Dapples the drowsy East with spots of grey.

—a figure which Milton has imitated in
L' Allegro. The passage in the same poem about the
newly-risen sun,

          Robed in flames and amber light,

is magnificent, but refers to a time subsequent
to the dawn—not to the dawn itself. So does
that resplendent picture of early morning on the
sea, in Midsummer Night's Dream; so does the
celebrated simile in one of Shakespaere's
Sonnets, about the sun, "flattering the mountaintops
with sovereign eye;" so does a grand line
in Richard the Second, in which the ascending
luminary is painted as

    He fires the proud tops of the eastern pines;

so do the numerous and most fresh and vital
descriptions of the matin season in Chaucer. In
Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, however, four
lines occur, which, considering the time when
they were written, are remarkable for their
absence of scholastic adornment:

              See! the day begins to break,
              And the light shoots like a streak
              Of subtle fire. The wind blows cold
               While the morning doth unfold.

This passage lhas been highly commended, and
the phrase about the " streak of subtle fire" is
unquestionably fine; but who ever saw the
morning light " shoot"? The word would be
very applicable if applied to the Aurora Borealis,
which darts out in long sudden javelins of
brilliance; but the dawn is remarkable for the
stealthiness of its approach. Is it not to be
suspected that Fletcher was thinking of what
was most effective, rather than of what was
most true?

The best poets of the present century have
been more faithful in their pictures of early
morning: indeed, it is the distinguishing feature
of modem poetry that, with less intellectual
power and wealth than the productions of the
Shakespearean and Miltonic eras, and less
imagination of the creative order, it is more exact
in its reflexion of external nature, because it is
more free from the despotism of classical models,
which sometimes bound down our greatest
authors to certain prescribed modes of seeing
things, as if a man dared not say a rose was red,
or a lily white, unless he had the authority of
the schools for so doing. Perhaps there is no
description of the coming on of light so perfect
as that which Shelley has given us in his little
poem, The Boat on the Serchio:

   The stars burnt out in the pale blue air,
   And the thin white moon lay withering there:
   To tower, and cavern, and rift, and tree,
   The owl and the bat fled drowsily.
   Day had kindled the dewy woods,
   And the rocks above, and the stream below,
   And the vapours in their multitudes,
   And the Apennines' shroud of summer snow,
   And clothed with light of aery gold
   The mists in their eastern caves uproll'd.
   Day had awaken'd all things that be,—
   The lark and the thrush and the swallow free,
   And the milkmaid's song and the mower's scythe,
   And the matin bell and the mountain bee.
   Fire-flies were quench'd on the dewy corn,
   Glow-worms went out on the river's brim,
   Like lamps which a student forgets to trim:
   The beetle forgot to wind his horn;
   The crickets were still in the meadow and hill.

Observe the overmastering truth, and yet the
exquisite fancy and imagination, as well as the
marvellous melody, of those lines. How immeasurably
finer is this simple reliance on the eternal
Divinity that is in Nature, than any pomp of
imagery derived from the evanescent mythologies
of men! How close the observation of facts, and
yet how poetical and musical the utterance! How
full of space, and exaltation, and skyey splendour,
the first section of the passage; how faithful to
the sweet, abiding habitudes of man, and beast,
and insect, the second! And then—after a few
more lines—how solemn and religious (with a
change in the measure to mark the change in
the poet's mood) is that which follows!

    All rose to do the task He set to each
    Who shaped us to His ends, and not our own.

Nothing, too, can be more beautiful than two
stanzas in Mrs. Browning's Song of the Morning
Star to Lucifer:

   Henceforward, human eyes of lovers be
   The only sweetest sight that I shall see,
   With tears between the looks raised up to me:

   When, having wept all night, at break of day
   Above the folded hills they shall survey
   My light, a little trembling, in the grey.

To return to the older poets: we deduce
from the passages quoted, and from several