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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40130 ***
+
+[Illustration: Colour plate of book cover]
+
+[Illustration: Byron portrait plate]
+
+
+    PARADISE LOST. BK. XII. _Painting by S. Meteyard._
+
+    "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
+    Through Eden took their solitary way."
+
+                           (_Paradise Lost. Bk. XII._)
+
+
+[Illustration: Paradise lost plate]
+
+
+
+
+    A DAY WITH
+    JOHN MILTON
+
+    BY MAY BYRON
+
+
+[Illustration: "Angel" plate]
+
+
+    HODDER & STOUGHTON
+
+
+
+
+    _In the same Series._
+
+    _Tennyson._
+    _Browning._
+    _E. B. Browning._
+    _Burns._
+    _Byron._
+    _Longfellow._
+    _Whittier._
+    _Rossetti._
+    _Shelley._
+    _Scott._
+    _Coleridge._
+    _Morris._
+    _Wordsworth._
+    _Whitman._
+    _Keats._
+    _Shakespeare._
+
+
+
+
+A DAY WITH JOHN MILTON
+
+
+About four o'clock on a September morning of 1665,--when the sun was
+not yet shining upon his windows facing the Artillery Fields, and the
+autumnal dew lay wet upon his garden leaves,--John Milton awoke with
+his customary punctuality, and, true to his austere and abstemious mode
+of life, wasted no time over comfortable indolence. He rose and
+proceeded to dress, with the help of his manservant Greene. For,
+although he was but fifty-four years in age, his hands were partly
+crippled with gout and chalkstones, and his eyes, clear, bright and blue
+as they had always been to outward seeming, were both stone-blind.
+
+Milton still retained much of that personal comeliness which had won
+him, at Cambridge, the nickname of "Lady of Christ's College." His
+original red and white had now become a uniform pallor; his thick,
+light brown hair, parted at the top, and curling richly on his
+shoulders--(no close-cropt Roundhead this!)--was beginning to fade
+towards grey. But his features were noble and symmetrical; he was
+well-built and well-proportioned; and he was justified in priding
+himself upon a personal appearance which he had never neglected or
+despised. In his own words, he was "neither large nor small: at no time
+had he been considered ugly; and in youth, with a sword by his side, he
+had never feared the bravest."
+
+Such was the man who now, neatly dressed in black, was led into his
+study, upon the same floor as his bedroom,--a small chamber hung with
+rusty green,--and there, seated in a large old elbow-chair, received the
+morning salutations of his three daughters.
+
+One after another they entered the room, and each bestowed a
+characteristic greeting upon her father. Anne, the eldest, a handsome
+girl of twenty, was lame, and had a slight impediment in her speech. She
+bade him good-morning with a stammering carelessness, enquired casually
+as to his night's rest, and stared out of window, palpably bored at the
+commencement of another monotonous, irksome day. Mary, the second,
+--dark, impetuous, and impatient,--was in a state of smouldering
+rebellion. She addressed him in a tone of almost insolent mock-civility,
+--he must needs have been deaf as well as blind not to detect the
+unfilial dislike beneath her words. Ten-year-old Deborah, the most
+affectionate of the three, ventured to kiss her father, even to stroke
+his long, beautiful hair, and to re-tie the tassels of his collar.
+
+"Mary will read to me this morning," said Milton, gravely inclining his
+head in acknowledgment of Deborah's attentions. The dark girl, with a
+mutinous shrug of her shoulders, sat down and began to read aloud, in a
+hard, uninterested voice, out of the great leather-bound Hebrew Old
+Testament which lay upon the table. And not one single sentence did she
+understand--not one word of what she was reading.
+
+John Milton's theories of education, which he had expounded at length in
+pamphlets, were a curious blend of the practical and the ideal. Vastly
+in advance of his time in his demand for a practical training, he had
+evolved that "fine definition which has never been improved upon,"--"I
+call a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform,
+justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and
+public, of peace and war." But he made no allowances for slowness or
+stupidity: all his schemes were based upon the existence of scholars
+equally gifted with himself. And he entirely left out of all
+calculations, much as a Mahommedan might, that complex organism the
+female mind. He wished it, one must conjecture, to remain a blank. So
+his daughters had received no systematic schooling, only some sort of
+home-instruction from a governess. And he had himself trained them to
+read aloud in five or six languages,--French, Italian, Latin, Greek,
+Hebrew and even Syriac,--in total ignorance of the meaning.
+"One tongue," observed Milton brusquely, almost brutally, "is enough
+for any woman."
+
+Mary read on, steadily, stolidly, sullenly, for a full hour. The others
+had left the room and were busy upon household tasks. At the conclusion
+of two chapters, "Leave me," commanded Milton, "I would be alone now for
+contemplation,"--and Mary willingly escaped to breakfast.
+
+The great poet reclined in his chair,--wrapt in such solemn and
+melancholy meditation as might have served as the model for his own
+_Penseroso_. A severe composure suffused his fine features, a serious
+sadness looked out of his unclouded eyes; his entire expression was
+"that of English intrepidity mixed with unutterable sorrow." For Milton
+was a bitterly disappointed man.
+
+It was not merely his comparative poverty,--because the Restoration,
+besides depriving him of his post as Latin or Foreign Secretary to the
+Commonwealth Council of State, had reduced his means from various
+sources almost to vanishing point.
+
+Nor was his melancholy mainly the result of his affliction; that he had
+deliberately incurred, and was as deliberately enduring. Constant
+headaches, late study, and perpetual recourse to one nostrum after
+another, had eventuated in the certainty of total blindness if he
+persisted in his mode of work.
+
+    "The choice lay before me between dereliction of a supreme duty and
+     loss of eyesight; ... and I therefore concluded to employ the
+     little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in doing this, the
+     greatest service to the common weal it was in my power to render."
+
+No: it was not a personal matter which could sadden John Milton to the
+very roots of his stern, ambitious, courageous soul. It was the
+contravention of all that he held most dear in life,--the frustration,
+as he conceived it, of that liberty which was his very heart's blood by
+the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy. He had resolved, in his own
+words, to transfer into the struggle for liberty "all my genius and all
+the strength of my industry." It appeared that he had flung away both
+in vain. The Stuart monarchy, to him, lay monstrously black,
+overshadowing all the land, like his own conception of Satan.
+
+The Restoration was not merely the political defeat of his party, it was
+the total defeat of the principles, of the religious and social ideals,
+with which Milton's life was bound up. He had always stood aloof from
+the other salient men of the time. Of Cromwell he had practically no
+personal knowledge: with the bulk of the Presbyterians he was openly at
+enmity. "Shut away behind a barrier of his own ideas," he did not care
+to associate with men of less lofty intellectual standing. But now he
+was even more isolated. Since the downfall of the Puritan régime, he of
+necessity "stood alone, and became the party himself." And he presented,
+in his _Samson Agonistes_, "the intensest utterance of the most intense
+of English poets--the agonised cry of the beaten party," condensed into
+the expression of one unflinching and heroic soul.
+
+Upon the mysterious and inscrutable decrees of Providence, which had
+laid in the dust what seemed to him the very cause of God, Milton sat
+and pondered, in a despondency so profound, a disappointment so
+poignant, that his own great lines had sought in vain to voice it:
+
+    "... I feel my genial spirits droop,
+    My hopes all flat: Nature within me seems
+    In all her functions weary of herself;
+    My race of glory run, and race of shame,
+    And I shall shortly be with them that rest."
+
+                          (_Samson Agonistes_).
+
+Yet his indomitable spirit was by no means quenched in despair: and an
+outlet was now open to him at last, which for eighteen years he had
+foregone,--the outlet of poetic expression. He was conscious of his
+capacity to travel and to traverse the regions which none had dared
+explore save Dante. And with that tremendous chief of pioneers he was
+measuring himself, man to man.
+
+He was able, above the turmoil of faction and the tumult of conflicting
+troubles, to weigh
+
+    "... his spread wings, at leisure to behold
+    Far off the empyreal Heaven, extended wide
+    In circuit, undetermined square or round,
+    With opal towers and battlements adorned
+    Of living sapphire, once his native seat."
+
+                           (_Paradise Lost_).
+
+That Milton had been silent for so long a period was due, firstly to his
+preoccupation with political and polemical questions, into which he had
+thrown the whole weight of his mind; and, secondly, to the effect of his
+own firm resolve that the great epic, which, he had always secretly
+intended, should be the outcome of matured and ripened powers: the
+apotheosis of all that was worthiest in him: the full fruit of his
+strenuous life. He had long since arrived at that conclusion, never
+surpassed in its terseness and truth, that true poetry must be "simple,
+sensuous, impassioned,"--words which might serve as the text and
+touchstone of art. "And long it was not after" when he
+
+    "was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of
+     his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to
+     be a true poem."
+
+For poetry, to John Milton, was no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal; in
+his hand "the thing became a trumpet," apt to seraphic usages and the
+rallying of celestial cohorts.
+
+Therefore, when he ceased to touch the "tender stops of various quills"
+that trembled into silence in _Lycidas_, it was not as one discomfited
+of his attainment. Rather it was as one convinced of a mighty purpose,
+and patiently awaiting the just time of its fulfilment. The "woodnotes
+wild" of _Comus_, the exquisitely stippled _genre_ painting of
+_Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, were mere childish attempts compared with
+that monumental work to which Milton firmly proposed to devote the
+fruition of his genius. And now, having become a man through mental and
+physical experience even more than through the passage of years, he had
+put away childish things. He had resolved at last upon, and had at last
+undertaken, the one subject most congenial to his taste, and most
+suitable to his style and diction. _Paradise Lost_ was the triumphant
+offspring of his brain. It had sprung, like light, from chaos. Out of
+the darkness of poverty, blindness and defeat arose the poem which was
+to set him on the pinnacles of Parnassus.
+
+"You make many enquiries as to what I am about" he wrote in bygone years to
+his old schoolfellow, Charles Diodati. "What am I thinking of? Why with
+God's help, of immortality! Forgive the word, I only whisper it in your
+ear. Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight." Nor was this the idle
+boasting of an egotist, the empty imagination of a dreamer.
+
+Consumed by "the desire of honour and repute and universal fame,
+seated," as he put it, "in the breast of every true scholar," Milton
+sedulously and assiduously had prepared himself for the achievement of
+his aims. That he should "strictly meditate the thankless Muse" required
+a certain self-control. "To scorn delights and live laborious days" is
+not the customary delight of a handsome young scholar, expert in
+swordsmanship as in languages. To equip himself for his self-chosen
+task, still a misty, undefined prospect in the remotest future, required
+strenuous and disciplined study; and necessitated his forgoing too
+frequently the scenes of rustic happiness which he had pictured so
+charmingly in _L'Allegro_,--absenting himself from "The groves and
+ruins, and the beloved village elms ... where I too, among rural scenes
+and remote forests, seemed as if I could have grown and vegetated
+through a hidden eternity."
+
+And this, though Milton had neither the eye nor the ear of a born
+nature-lover, was in itself a sufficient deprivation and sacrifice. For
+beauty appealed to him with a most earnest insistence,--and the purer,
+the more abstract form it took, the more urgent was that appeal. "God
+has instilled into me, at all events," he declared, "a vehement love of
+the beautiful. Not with so much labour is Ceres said to have sought
+Proserpine, as I am wont, day and night, to search for the idea of the
+beautiful through all forms and faces of things, and to follow it
+leading me on with certain assured traces."
+
+Yet not alone among "forms and faces" was he predestined to discover
+that Absolute Beauty. The passionate love of music, so frequently
+characteristic of a great linguist, which led him into sound-worlds as
+well as sight-worlds, was fated to remain with him, an incalculable
+consolation, when "forms and faces" could be no more seen. And into the
+vocabulary of _Paradise Lost_, that incomparably rich vocabulary, with
+its infallible ear for rhythm, for phrase, for magnificent consonantal
+effects and the magic of great names that reverberate through open
+vowels,--into this he poured forth his whole sense of beautiful sound,
+
+         "as the wakeful bird
+    Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid,
+    Tunes her nocturnal note."
+
+_Paradise Lost_ remains, as has been observed, "The elaborated outcome
+of all the best words of all antecedent poetry--the language of one who
+lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of all past time,
+equally magnificent in verbiage, whether describing man, or God, or the
+Arch-Enemy visiting" this pendent world, when
+
+    Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
+    Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he lives.
+
+At seven o'clock the body-servant Greene re-entered, followed by Mrs.
+Milton, the poet's third wife, and by Mary Fisher, their maid-servant,
+bringing in his breakfast, a light, slight repast. Mrs. Milton, _née_
+Elizabeth Minshull, of Nantwich, was a comely, active, capable woman,
+"of a peaceful and agreeable humour," so far at least as her husband was
+concerned: for she shared the traditional destiny of a stepmother in not
+"hitting it off" with the first wife's daughters. Her golden hair and
+calm commonsense were in striking contrast, alike with the dark beauty
+and petulant spirit of Mary Powell, and with the fragile sweetness of
+Catherine Woodcock, Milton's former spouses. If she did not in her heart
+confirm her husband's celebrated theory of the relative position of man
+and wife,--"He for God only, she for God in him,"--(which, it has been
+said, "condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her
+husband and to her Maker"), she managed very adroitly to convey an
+impression of entire acquiescence in the will of her lord. And at least
+she was entirely adequate as a housewife.
+
+Had Milton ever encountered that "not impossible She" whom he portrayed
+in his ideal Eve? or was this latter a mere visionary abstract of great
+qualities, "to show us how divine a thing a woman may be made"? Neither
+of his three wives, nor yet that "very handsome and witty gentlewoman,"
+Miss Davis, to whom he had at one time paid his addresses, conformed to
+this description: one cannot even conjecture that it was a _pasticcio_
+of their respective fine attributes.
+
+Mrs. Milton, third of that name, as she bustled and busied herself about
+the study, was by no means a new Eve. She regarded her husband's
+ambitions and achievements with that good natured tolerance so
+characteristic of the materially-minded. Only genius can appreciate
+genius; and the man who shut himself away from his _confrères_ in
+scholarship and literature was not likely to unbosom himself to his
+housewifely, provincial wife.
+
+
+    COMUS.   _Painting by S. Meteyard._
+
+    Sabrina rises attended by water nymphs,
+        "By the rushy-fringed bank,
+        Where grows the willow and the osier dank,"
+
+                                         (_Comus_).
+
+
+[Illustration: Comus colour plate]
+
+
+The manservant Greene, breakfast being concluded, read aloud, or wrote
+to his master's dictation for some hours. This had formerly been the
+girls' daily office, but they were revolting more and more,--the whole
+position was becoming untenable, for they resented the presence of their
+stepmother as much as they disliked the duties which fettered them to
+their father's side, and forced them to parrot-like, futile drudgery in
+unknown tongues. To-day, however, Greene was relieved of the task, for
+which he was manifestly but ill-fitted, by the entrance of Milton's two
+favourite visitors.
+
+No celebrity ever had fewer friends. From all who might have called
+themselves such, he was separated by hostility of party, rancour of
+sect or by that almost repellent isolation of character to which
+reference has already been made. When at the highest of his political
+fame, he had almost boasted himself of this "splendid isolation,"--"I
+have very little acquaintance with those in power, inasmuch as I keep
+very much to my own house, and prefer to do so." At heart a Republican
+beyond the conception of any Roundhead,--cherishing a form of religion
+so recondite that it could be classed under no heading, since he ignored
+both public worship and family prayer,--having given offence to all and
+sundry by his outspoken theories upon divorce and divine right,--Milton
+presented to most men a dangerous personality. And most of all now, when
+the wits of the Restoration roués could be sharpened upon him, and when
+the heathen, as he considered them, roistered and ruffled it through the
+city that had "returned to her wallowing in the mire."
+
+Yet those who had sat at his feet as pupils, retained a singular
+affection for their former master. For all such young folk as adopted
+the disciple's attitude, the stern self-contained man had a very soft
+spot in his heart. With such, he was not only instructive, but genial,
+almost cheerful; and they alone could move him to the only utterances
+which were neither "solemn, serious or sad." Chief among his former
+pupils were those who now made entrance--Henry Lawrence and Cyriac
+Skinner.
+
+It may be guessed, therefore, with what pleasure the blind poet received
+these loyal and affectionate men. His pensive face became transformed
+with interest and animation, as with gentle courtesy and unfeigned
+delight he turned his sightless eyes from one speaker to another. Upon
+every subject he had a ready flow of easy, colloquial conversation,
+seasoned with shrewd satire: his deep and musical voice ran up and down
+the whole gamut of worthy topics. Sometimes he fell into the stately,
+almost stilted diction of his great prose pamphlets,--sometimes he spoke
+in racy English vernacular,--sometimes, warming to his subject, he
+assumed an almost fiery eloquence. But when, at twelve o'clock, he was
+escorted downstairs to dinner in the parlour, the metamorphosis was
+complete. This was no longer the brooding introspective man of the early
+morning, but one "extreme pleasant in his conversation," almost merry in
+society so congenial,--the life of the party: abstinent, but not ascetic,
+having a healthy, human enjoyment of the dishes set before him.
+
+"These are the victuals most to my liking," he observed as he ate,
+"being seasonable and withal of no great cost. For that which is of great
+rarity or richness, and must be procured with care or toil, hath no
+temptation for me."
+
+"I do always my best, Mr. Milton," replied his wife, "that you shall be
+well satisfied: and methinks to-day I have hit your taste right fairly."
+
+"God ha' mercy, Betty," said Milton, regarding her with an air of kindly
+tolerance, "I see thou wilt perform according to thy promise in providing
+me such dishes as I think fit while I live; and when I die, thou knowest
+I have left thee all." Here Anne, Mary and Deborah sat up very straight,
+and directed looks of fury and astonishment towards their stepmother.
+
+"Talk not o' dying, in God's name, man," responded the embarrassed Betty,
+"we have enough to do to make shift to live, nowadays," and she hastily
+pressed her good but simple fare, homely Cheshire dishes well-prepared,
+upon the two guests. "Such a many learned foreign folk have visited our
+poor house these latter days,--time hath failed me for my
+cheese-cakes,--and of the havercakes I made two days agone, why, not a
+crumb is left. But eat, my masters, eat and drink. Though these be but
+country victuals, none of your Court kickshaws, I warrant you they are
+fresh and savoury. I would commend you, now, to this rabbit pie--"
+
+"Peace, Betty, peace. The woman prates o' pies like a pie (magpie)
+herself. What saith the Apostle? _I suffer not a woman to speak_ in
+presence of the man's authority. Ha' done, good Betty, with thy harping
+on kitchen matters,--let thy savoury messes be companioned with a sauce
+of silence."
+
+Temporary eclipse of Mrs. Milton: obvious and malevolent satisfaction of
+Anne and Mary: desperately suppressed inclination to giggle on the part
+of little Deborah: and a desire to cover up the situation with talk, as
+regards kindly Lawrence and courtly Skinner.
+
+The "foreign folk" were no new thing. Milton's fame, indeed, was European:
+as a prose-writer and pamphleteer, be it understood, not as a poet. Had
+he not refuted and put to shame the most erudite scholars of the day?
+Foreign _savants_ of note, therefore, who might be visiting London, were
+desirous to acquaint themselves with so powerful a personality: and the
+little house in the Artillery Walk was the rendezvous for many
+distinguished persons. They found their host no such recluse as town-talk
+might have led them to imagine, but one ready and willing to converse
+with them,--an English gentleman to the backbone, a scholar and artist
+to the finger-tips. His Continental tours and Italian sojourns had made
+him less insular than most of his compatriots, and his vast range of
+reading had imparted a certain cosmopolitanism to his exceedingly
+individual lines of thought. The visitors found him, moreover, employed
+upon a work so important, and of a theme so lofty, as might well give
+them pause, considering the circumstances under which it was being
+accomplished: and whatever their particular religious tenets might be,
+they could not fail to admire the magnitude of his aim in composing
+_Paradise Lost_,--"To justify the ways of God to men."
+
+
+    PARADISE LOST. BK. II   _Painting by S. Meteyard._
+
+    "Satan with less toil, and now with ease, ...
+    Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold ...
+      This pendent world in bigness as a star
+    Of smallest magnitude."
+
+                            (_Paradise Lost. Bk. II._)
+
+
+[Illustration: Satan in paradise colour plate]
+
+
+Dinner despatched, the master of the house, led by his devoted friends,
+went out into the garden. A garden was the desideratum of his existence,
+and he had never been without one; for in seventeenth-century London
+every house was fitly furnished in this respect. Here Milton was in the
+habit of taking that steady exercise which was a _sine quâ non_ to a
+sedentary and gouty man. He made a point of walking up and down out of
+doors, in cold weather, for three or four hours at a time,--sometimes
+composing his majestic lines, sometimes merely meditating. When weary
+with walking, he would come in and either dictate what he had conceived,
+or would take further exercise in a swing. In really warm weather, he
+received his visitors sitting outside his house door, wrapped in a
+coarse grey overcoat--gazing out upon the fields of the Artillery ground
+with those "unblemished eyes" that belied their own clear beauty--"the
+only point," as he said, "in which I am against my will a hypocrite."
+To-day, being cool and cloudy, allowed but intermittent periods in the
+open air. Milton, Lawrence and Skinner paced slowly to and fro, deep in
+enthralling intercourse, until three o'clock: when the rain and Thomas
+Elwood arrived simultaneously, and the other two men departed to their
+respective avocations.
+
+Thomas Elwood was a young Quaker of twenty-three, who was acting in some
+degree as honorary secretary to Milton. Himself of a defective education,
+and having been expelled from his father's house on account of his
+religious opinions, he was only too glad to take a lodging in the
+neighbourhood, and, by reading aloud to Milton every afternoon, acquire
+an amount of information and a variety of learning, which by no other
+means could he have obtained. And there was also a tacit sympathy
+between them, insomuch as Milton was, more and more, as life went on,
+inclining towards the Quaker tenets,--in those days, _bien entendu_,
+viewed with horror and detestation by the majority of men.
+
+Having re-entered the house, "We will not read as yet, Tom," Milton said,
+"I desire greatly to comfort myself with sweet sounds. Bring me into the
+withdrawing-room, and place me at the organ. A little bellows-blowing
+will not hurt thee, Tom. And let my wife attend me, that we may have
+song withal. She hath a good voice, though a poor ear."
+
+Seated at his beloved instrument, the blind man steeped himself in the
+principal pleasure that was left him. Milton's father, stout Puritan
+though he might be, was an accomplished musician, and had taught his
+son to play in early youth. The austerities of a narrow dogma had not
+been able to crush out the inveterate artistry of either father or
+son: and now the devotee of "divinest Melancholy" was able to solace
+himself with such lovely concords, such "anthems clear,"
+
+    "As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
+     Dissolve me into ecstasies,
+     And bring all heaven before mine eyes."
+
+Sometimes he sang as he played; sometimes Mrs. Milton, with her clear
+unemotional notes, sang to his accompaniment. Presently, that Elwood
+should not be wearied in his blowing, he quitted the organ for the
+bass-viol, on which he was no mean performer. At the conclusion of his
+playing he sat with a rapt, transfigured face, such as might well have
+called forth the Italian's encomium, thirty years before,--"If thy piety
+were equal to thy understanding, figure, eloquence, beauty and manners,
+verily thou wouldest not be an Angle but an Angel!"
+
+"And, now, good Tom," quoth Milton to the young man, "let us to work: the
+day moves on apace." They went upstairs to the study. "Before we read, I
+have some forty lines to set down," continued the poet, "all day they
+have been knocking for admission, and with that last music they made
+entrance. Needs must I house them now in ink and paper."
+
+"I am instant at thy bidding, friend," and Elwood seated himself with
+dutiful alacrity at the table. Milton, placing himself obliquely athwart
+his elbow-chair, with one leg thrown across the arm, dictated forty
+lines, almost in a breath,--they burst from him, as it would seem, in a
+stream no longer to be restrained.
+
+"Gently, gently, good sir!" exclaimed Elwood, "slow-witted and slow
+fingered I may be,--but I cannot keep pace with thee!"
+
+A grim smile hovered over Milton's full lips, "Out of practice, Tom," he
+replied indulgently, "it is a long while since I required this service
+at thy hands. From the autumnal to the vernal equinox, as I have told
+thee, my muse lies dumb,
+            and silent as the moon,
+    When she deserts the night,
+    Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
+
+
+But now the winter is overpast, the singing of birds is heard in our
+land, and she too awakes and sings. With the vernal equinox my thoughts
+flow free as Helicon." Then, with slow and deliberate diction, he
+repeated the lines once more: and, having had them read aloud to him, he
+compressed, condensed, concentrated every thought and phrase, and
+reduced them to twenty.
+
+"There is more to come?" queried Elwood, his quill poised ready to write.
+
+"No more. Not one word more at present," replied Milton, sighing as
+though somewhat exhausted.
+
+His inspiration was entirely intermittent: and sometimes he would lie
+awake all night, trying, but without success, to complete one single
+line to his liking. "They please me not wholly, these lines," he
+continued, "much remains to be done before I set them down to be changed
+no more."
+
+"Not every man would say so," replied Elwood, "the learning and
+erudition whereof these few lines alone give witness, would supply many
+with just cause for boasting throughout a lifetime."
+
+Milton shook his head. "Pomp and ostentation of reading," he remarked,
+"is admired among the vulgar: but in matters of religion, he is
+learnedest who is plainest."
+
+
+    IL PENSEROSO.   _Painting by S. Meteyard._
+
+        "And may at last my weary age
+        Find out the peaceful hermitage,
+        The hairy gown and mossy cell,
+        Where I may sit and rightly spell
+        Of every star that heaven doth show."
+
+                           (_Il Penseroso._)
+
+
+[Illustration: Il Penseroso colour plate]
+
+
+"Yet, Mr. Milton, thee hast the reputation of such scope and range of
+wisdom, as the greatest scholar in Europe might fitly envy. To me, I
+confess, in my poor unlettered ignorance, it is not conceivable in what
+manner thee acquired so great and witty powers."
+
+"I gathered them not of mine own strength," said Milton, "but they were
+mine for the asking and endeavour, and any man may obtain them in like
+fashion. I ceased not, nor will cease, in devout prayer to the Holy
+Spirit, that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out
+his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify
+the lips of whom He pleases. To this must be added select reading, and
+steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous acts and
+affairs.... And now, good Tom, to reading."
+
+Elwood took up the Latin author which he was at present engaged upon,
+and proceeded with it. Whenever the preternaturally acute ear of Milton
+detected, by Elwood's intonation, that he did not quite understand a
+sentence, he would stop him, examine him, and elucidate the difficult
+passage. By and by, "You will find a saying very similar to that," he
+observed, "in Virgil his Fourth Eclogue. Fetch down the book, and let us
+hear what the Mantuan hath written therein."
+
+Elwood searched along the bookshelves, but to no avail. "Friend," said
+he, "thy Virgil is no longer here. Yesterday I handled it myself,--to-day
+it is vanished. So is the Lucretius." A frown contracted Milton's
+splendid brow. "These women-kind," he muttered like rumbling thunder,
+"they are verily the root of all evil. Bid me hither my wife and
+daughters, and Mary Fisher the maid moreover." The first and the last,
+being summoned, arrived in all haste, and disavowed any knowledge of the
+missing books. Anne and Mary Milton, it appeared, were gone out
+marketing: but little Deborah, being strictly cross-examined, confessed
+that she had seen sister Anne carrying books away from the study last
+night when their father had retired: the wherewithal for "marketing"
+was easily obtained in this way.
+
+Milton groaned in his ineptitude. "How have I deserved this treacherous
+dealing at their hands? Lord, how long shall I be
+
+              dark in light exposed
+    To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
+    Within doors and without, still as a fool
+    In power of others, never in my own?
+
+                          (_Samson Agonistes_).
+
+
+Here, by a happy coincidence, there was a sturdy hammering heard at the
+front door, and Andrew Marvell was ushered in, "I am out of my due
+time," said he, "for it is not yet gone six,"--(six to eight P.M. being
+Milton's best time for receiving visitors). "Yet to so old an offender
+as myself, John, I know thou wilt make an exception." Marvell was the
+one friend of his own type and standing, the one constant and
+inalienable comrade, upon whose fidelity the blind man could rely. He had
+formerly been Milton's colleague under the Cromwellian Government: and
+was his kindred spirit, so far as anyone could claim such relationship
+with the frozen heights of the poet's intellect.
+
+With him, during the next two hours--the learned physician Paget joining
+them, and Elwood listening in respectful silence to the converse of these
+mighty men--Milton forgot the vexations of his ill-assorted household. He
+assured his friends that he was truly far happier now, in poverty,
+infirmity and neglect, occupied solely upon his long-projected
+masterpiece, than during the eighteen years of his manly prime, when his
+mind and pen were solely employed upon the controversies which he now
+professed to hate. "Never again," he declared, "shall earthly ambitions
+interrupt and thwart me: never now shall I endure to leave a calm and
+pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to
+embark in a tumbled sea of noises and hoarse disputes. Cast out of my
+fool's Paradise of fame not worth the finding, shall, not I and the hope
+whereunto I am wedded explore some fair and fragrant tract of outer
+Eden? Even as I have set forth the banishment of our first parents:
+
+    Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
+    The world was all before them, where to choose
+    Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
+    They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
+    Through Eden took their solitary way.
+
+                                       (_Paradise Lost_).
+
+
+I and my espoused hope indeed do tread through Eden."
+
+The four men now, at eight o'clock, went down to supper: a very spare and
+frugal meal, so far as Milton was concerned: for all he consumed was a
+little light wine, a piece of bread and a few olives. His flow of speech
+was still unwearied, his spirits as near vivacity as they could approach
+it, when his friends rose to take leave. "The night is yet young," said
+Paget, "but I know that nowadays you seek rest early." "That is so,"
+Milton assented, "since I am no longer able to study o' nights, and
+since the best of secretaries,"--he smiled towards Elwood--"must needs
+grow weary of a blind man's whims, I were as well in bed as out of it.
+Moreover, I can compose my lines to better advantage lying down."
+
+"One thing, at least, you are spared," Marvell told him, "darkness
+cannot discommode your doings, nor doth the eye-weariness of the
+midnight student afflict you with grievous brow-aches in the morning as
+of old."
+
+Milton answered, "My darkness hitherto, by the singular kindness of God,
+amid rest and studies, and the voices and greetings of friends, has been
+much easier to bear than that deathly one. What should prevent me from
+resting in the belief that eyesight lies not in eyes alone, but enough
+for all purposes in God's leading and providence? And to you now I bid
+farewell, with a mind not less brave and steadfast than if I were
+Lynceus himself for keenness of sight."
+
+In a short space of time he was at rest in his darkened room; not as yet
+drowsy, but revolving great phrases, and deriving a greater joy from
+these lonely silences of the night-watches than could ever accrue to him
+by day. Gradually the aisles and bowers of the Paradise which his mental
+eyes enjoyed took upon them more and more the lovely similitude of rural
+England. The greennesses and sweetnesses of his childhood's home, the
+Buckinghamshire village, were fused into the "eternal spring" of the
+primeval garden. And from the "glassy, cool, translucent wave" of the
+river that ran through Eden,
+
+    "by the rushy-fringed bank
+     Where grows the willow and the osier dank,"
+
+arose "Sabrina, attended by water-nymphs" as once he saw her rise in
+_Comus_, and sang the sightless bard to sleep with the plashing of
+water-music.
+
+
+[Illustration: "Rose"]
+
+
+    _Printed by Percy Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd._
+    _Bradford and London._
+
+                                          _10322_
+
+
+                       ====================
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+Some illustration's captions have been moved out of the paragraph.
+
+The following captions have been added:
+  Illustration: Colour plate of book cover;
+  Illustration: Byron portrait plate;
+  Illustration: Paradise lost plate;
+  Illustration: "Angel" plate;
+  Illustration: Comus colour plate;
+  Illustration: Satan in paradise colour plate;
+  Illustration: Il Penseroso colour plate;
+  Illustration: "Rose".
+
+The following noted Illustration was removed:
+  Dropped Cap "A" at start of text - "About ..."
+
+Spelling has been made consistent throughout.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Day with John Milton, by May Byron
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40130 ***