any mere "endless delight of speculation" for his hesitation-grounds which had not yet turned him from his resolution, but were evidently in course of doing In this same remarkable letter he encloses the well-known beautiful sonnet "On his being arrived at the age of twenty-three: " so. "How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, ness. But my late spring no bud or blossom showeth. To that same lot, however mean or high, Towards which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye." There is beneath the deprecating tone of the sonnet the same quiet consciousness of strength as in the letter, and especially the same grave moral seriousHis "inward ripeness" might much less appear, considering his years, than in the case of others; but even while his modesty suggests this thought, his heart tells him that the ripeness is there, and will show itself in full time; and his proud integrity, and climbing earnestness, he knows, are equal to any task that may be assigned him. There is now, and at all times, in Milton, a sustained self-conscious strength and dignity of purpose which shrinks from no inspection. On leaving Cambridge, after taking his Master's degree in July 1632, Milton retired to his "father's country residence" at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. Hither the scrivener had sought a pleasant retreat in which to spend his old age. The world had prospered with him; his daughter was well and happily married, and his sons nearly educated, and looking forward to settlement in the world; and so he sought repose, in his declining years, from the cares of business, amidst the rural delights whose memory had lingered in his heart from the days that he left the village home in Oxfordshire. Horton is pleasantly situated, not far from Windsor, in the district familiarly known in our political history as the Chiltern Hundreds. A fertile landscape, well wooded and watered, "russet lawns and fallows grey," and the quiet rich meadow-pastures, such as the English eye delights to look upon, formed the scene then as well as now—the noble towers of Windsor, "bosomed high in tufted trees," rising over it, and crowning it with their magnificence. Here Milton spent the most part of the next five years of his life, varied by occasional journeys to London for the purpose of purchasing books, or of "learning something new in mathematics or in music." There is no period of our poet's life that fixes itself in such a fitting and felicitous picture before the mind as these five years at Horton. It is the eminently poetical period of his life-poetical not merely in the luxuriant inspiration of the "Allegro" and "Penseroso," the Arcades," "Comus," and "Lycidas," but in the circumstances in which we image him to ourselves; for without drawing upon our mere fancy, we cannot but conceive him as a loving and delighted student of nature in those years. He himself, indeed, says nothing of his conscious delight in nature. In his allusions to this period he speaks rather of his hard and continued studies. "In continued reading, I deduced the affairs of the Greeks to the time when they ceased to be Greeks." But, however busy with his historical studies, his imagination must have been also intensely quickened by the outward world around him. At every pore of his sensitive being he must have drunk in deep draughts of natural beauty, and through every sense garnered up treasures of imagery for exquisite use; for his poems of this period, especially the "Allegro" and "Penseroso," show a pure, full, and unrestrained abandonment to outward impressions, quite singular with him. The most charming com placency in Nature is united to the most vehement and passionate sympathies with it. His soul goes forth in revel with its moods-now gay with its smiles, now sad with its gloom, now singing in a clear heaven of light, and now "most musical, most melancholy." There is little or none of the self-conscious restraint, reflective subtlety, and elaborate application that may be traced in his muse both before and afterwards. For example, in his ode on the "Nativity," composed before leaving college, as well as in his college exercises, we see strongly at work the didactic elements of his mind forecasting a high and solemn lesson in every play of thought; and this moral intent-this divine aim was deeply implanted in the very heart of Milton's genius, and gives its complexion to all his most characteristic writings. But now, for a while, in his fresh and free communion with nature, he is able to forget this moral spirit, and to surrender himself to the mere wayward impulses of sensuous feeling as they stir him. It is as if he had made a pause in the serious and thoughtful purposes of his life, and given himself up for a season to an entranced enjoyment of external life and beauty. The sonnet on "May Morning," which opens this series of his poems, strikes the key-note of the whole: "Now the bright morning star, day's harbinger, Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her And welcome thee, and wish thee long." The song of the nightingale warbling at eve, "when all the woods are still;" the night raven singing beneath the "jealous wings" of the "brooding darkness;" the lark beginning her flight and "startling the dull night" "from her watch-tower in the skies;" the "dappled dawn," "the frolic wind," "breathing the spring," and "the rocking winds piping loud;" the great sun "Robed in flames and amber light, The clouds in thousand liveries dight;" the morn "riding near her highest noon;" and 66 as if her head she bowed, Stooping through a fleecy cloud;" the "upland hamlets, with many a youth and maid "Dancing in the checkered shade;" and the evening stories when the dance is done, spiced by the "nut-brown ale;" the whistle of the ploughman o'er the furrowed land; the blithe song of the milkmaid; the mower whetting his scythe, and the shepherd telling his tale, "Under the hawthorn in the dale." Such are mere fragments of the series of imagery that meets us in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," all gathered from the daily scenes and sounds surrounding the poet in Horton, filling his heart with gladness, colouring his imagination with the most varied hues, and moulding his utterances to the most perfect music. There are nowhere in our language such charming naturepieces-such breathings of harmonious responsiveness to the checkered influences of the external world as they play over the soul, and draw it now to mirth and now to melancholy, now to rapture and now to sadness. It requires an effort of thought to realise the Milton of later years in those effusions, with scarce a plan, without the least trace of moral lesson; like the continuous snatches of a melodious spirit swayed by the sensitive impulses of the hour, and catching up, by the mere affinity of imaginative contrast-by the links of mere vagrant association-the successive pictures that evoke and express its feeling. They have none of the classicality of his "Ode"-of its severe majesty, its spiritual aim. They are the mere warblings of a rich-souled child of nature, giving forth, in bursts of lyrical sweetness, the natural impressions which have sunk into his being and wakened it to song. In the "Comus" and the "Lycidas" we have the same full, vivid, and rich appreciation of nature, but not the same degree of abandonment to its impulses. There is much more of ethical and didactic seriousness in both. The moral austerity of the lady in "Comus" rising in "sacred vehemence" against the "unhallowed" suggestions of the Bacchanal-the whole idea of the poem, which is essentially ethical, notwithstanding its light lyrical structure and the sensuous fulness of its imagery-remind us of Milton's more characteristic |