willow-herb, and meadow-sweet, and even the tall ostentatious spikes of loose-strife, haunted by water-rats in dozens-you come upon a grand, oldfashioned farm; a snipe at this moment flicks out of the rushes, and dodges out of sight across the marsh we have just left, a sign that Horton is not much disturbed by wandering mankind.

The road leads past two or three more rambling brick houses, each with the gravel sweep up to the front door, each delightfully unlike the rest, at varying distances from the road; one all front and no back, another with an unpromising portico, but row after row of huddling windows, stretching away to the cedar on the back lawn; houses that defy conjecture as to possible or even likely denizens; that suggest finally old maids of settled habits, and a very close scrutiny of life from their own or one another's parlour windows, the parson and the doctor their ideals of saintliness and sanity.

A three-cornered green, and a great, broad high-shouldered,irregular church, built of grey stone and mottled flints, with a chantry all out of proportion both in style and size to the rest of the building, giving it a peculiar and yet indefinable charm. The churchyard is bounded on both sides, though open to the road, by more brick walls -in this case older still-of the date when they have begun to be more yellow than red, dotted all over with crinkled rosettes of lichen, and tufted at the top with snapdragon and wallflower. In the middle of one side are two gigantic stone-topped gateposts, the intervening space unhappily now bricked up-probably by the same proprietor who pulled down Elizabethan manor-house, with its gables and mullions, that lurked amid moats and fishponds among the chestnuts behind the church, and substituted the stainless white house, with its circular pillared porch and double flight of steps, in style more like the mansion depicted in house-moving

the

advertisements than any other existing residence.

After gazing a little at the church -locked, of course, and we are in too desultory a mood to hunt for the Rectory and the key, though there is a certain inscribed blue-slate tombstone that we ought to see-we languidly inquire of a rustic, who has suspended what little occupation he had been engaged in, firmly planting his spade in the ground the while to watch our movements with microscopic interest, if he can direct us to the principal object of our pilgrimage. Receiving a somewhat ambiguous answer, we retrace our steps, and passing the farm from whose back we had struck into the road, we set our faces resolutely to the country. The road is dotted with Buckinghamshire cottages, woodwork and brick and delicious dilapidation; over the fallow and orchards at the right we can see the red roofs and yellow walls of Colnbrook. There is not a hill in sight, and overhead, as though to mark the solitude of the place, floats a heron down the wind, with an occasional flap of the great wings, towards the solitudes of Ditton or Black Park. Then a flock of peewits whirl querulously out of a ploughed field on the left with their thin, hopeless note, and in a few seconds are sixty feet up in air, unmistakable still by their curved wings and almost invisible bodies. And at last we draw up opposite a square yellowbrick villa of the pretentious, and yet slipshod, kind; hencoops and scattered provender on the lawn; a rank of ducks come clamouring out of a wicket, and an indolent-looking spaniel saunters inquiringly down to the gate, to do the honours of the house if he feels disposed.

"Milton villa," horrible juxtaposition! yet this is the only trace beside the blue-slate stone in the church, of the presence that gives Horton its significance and sacredness. It stands, it is said, upon the very site. And the view, too, is probably little altered. Across the fields you

see Windsor Castle, the only difference between what it looked then and what appears now being the altered height of the Round Tower, then more squat, and the trees which fringe these north-easterly slopes; for the Georgian pointing and the hideous Portland we are fortunately too far off to distinguish. And the fields; they must have been a little more trackless and irregular, more bosky and tumbled, retaining a little more hill and dale, an irregularity which generation after generation of ploughing has nearly counteracted; with copses and old field roads, if we can trust the dim Constables and Gainsboroughs, and with a general sense of less being required from them: a feeling, distressing to the economist but beloved by the poet, that landlords did not try to work the earth quite so hard, to get all they could out of her, but let her have her way in patches and corners, and make a little pastime of her own in nooks and dingles, so long as she served them well in the open ground; perhaps the reason why she seems to be in revolt just now.

But here let our amateur researches have an end. We will not dive into parish registers and title-deeds; we need not inquire whether the old scrivener held his lease from the Bulstrodes of Bulstrode or the Earl of Bridgewater. We have merely come to Horton to try and realise a page in a biography-to try and read a great figure into a landscape where it was once at home.

A solitary scholar living in the country a picture with little variety of outline but an indefinable charm. It was not till Charles the Second that the "fascinating pleasure of sauntering" was devised, developed, and dignified, but we may be quite sure that Milton knew of it. Tired a little of the inconveniences of Buckinghamshire, the frequency of visits to London necessary for books and music, he speaks of taking chambers at an Inn of Court,-and why? To get "a

pleasant and shady walk," as he writes. to Deodati, where he might loiter and dream. For it must be confessed that the beauty of which he was enamoured was not the beauty of Nature. Milton was not one of those who in times of stress and dissatisfaction can crouch back to the bosom of the great mother and be at rest there: no! it was rather of the beauty of thought; of high ideals; of conceptions dim and sublime. Nature was no necessity to Milton. In later life he became a settled Londoner, and not a regretful one; he did not fly back into the country as to his true home. He was not the sort of poet who can lie on his back and watch the willowleaves and the water hour after hour. What he wanted in a country place was quiet, absence of distracting impressions, free play for his mind, and for such sombre fancies as ranged themselves within it.

We may amuse ourselves by conjecturing how his day was spent. In summer, we may imagine, he rose with the dawn to turn over Latin and Greek authors, in no casual dilettante spirit, but jotting down facts, hard facts, and little else, as his extractbooks show, or impulsively turning a psalm into Greek Homerics, as he writes to Deodati, or pursuing his great scheme of History, laboriously advancing Greeks and Romans through year after year, for "insight into all generous and seemly acts and affairs," as he says; and then books, books all day, excepting a dreamy stroll, and books again, bringing to them as he did the keen lustre of a mind sharpened by perpetual temperance, and emasculated by no self-indulgence, dimmed by no ungentle retrospects. Like Hippolytus in the Ion he brings with him a gush of morning air and voices of birds; comely with his soft brown curling locks and "exhaling the penetrating fragrance of youth."

Undoubtedly to settle down for year after year to a life of deliberate aloofness from career or worldly interests shows either a drifting habit like Hawthorne's, which may, as in the

latter's case, bloom into a fantastic but unpruned luxuriance, or a stern devotion to self-education-a plan for intentional culture which few would have the power to devise, very few to carry out. The instinct, the necessity for solitude, characterising either the brutish or the divine nature, was upon him imperiously; he seems (as far as we can judge) to have had no reproachful reveries, no haunting sadness, too often the result of such a choice; for the sonnet on his twenty-third birthday, if read rightly, does not contain a hint of self-blame; it gazes with a momentary melancholy upon the rapacity of time, and its inadequacy for the combination of a practical idealbut there is nothing more.

Solitary we may be sure he was; not till he was on the point of his continental tour did he put himself in communication even with Henry Wotton, the retired diplomatist and courtier, then Provost of Eton, and residing within a four-mile walk; and then it was only for the sake of con venience in travel and superior intro ductions. Yet Henry Wotton, with his love for tobacco, and his zealous fishing expeditions, with his bottle of Eton ale, was pre-eminently a sociable person-an ideal for Milton in the graceful touch with which he brought to bear modern ideas and a cosmopolitan ease on a taste naturally delicate and artificially refined. And Wotton, too, as we can absolutely augur from the delightful letter which he writes to him, took the kind of affectionate fancy for Milton which an older and accomplished scholar, who has sucked the honey of life and found, not its sweetness, but only his own powers of enjoyment fail, will sometimes take to a young and fascinating soul, already far upon the same path with himself, like the λauradηpópos of Sparta, a fit successor to whom to hand on the lighted brand. "Your friend, as much at command as any of longer date, Henry Wotton!" "The fomentation of our friendship too soon interrupted in the cradle;" these phrases, occurring

in the first (and only) letter of the elder to the younger man, are not merely complimentary, they are affectionate.

But Milton was a bad correspondent. He speaks of the obstinacy of his silences, confesses that he was by nature slow and reluctant to write. The letters of the Horton period are few, though we cannot argue the same unexpansiveness from a small correspondence then as we can nowadays. But the law is the same for Milton, we can see, as for most men-the fewer obvious duties a man has, the more perfunctorily they will be performed. Milton, with his long contemplative spaces, his complete freedom from business or prescribed action, selfimposed as they were, was probably no exception to the rule.

There is one delightful thing which we glean from scattered hints, notably from Andrew Marvel's description of the arrangement of his ordinary day in later life, and from the sonnet to Henry Lawrence. Milton was one of those home-bred natures that literally loved monotony; the sonnet is a delightful description in the strictest Horatian manner of how to spend a wet day satisfactorily in the country a light lunch, followed by music or singing.

"He who of such delights can judge, and spare

To interpose them oft, is not unwise.'

-a delightful confession. Such enjoyment only belongs to the lives of those who cling to home and regular hours, and a small circle of very habitual friends.

He was evidently one of those natures who learnt very early by a kind of fastidious instinct the high pleasures of abstinence; not by tampering with indulgence and finding his mistake, a course which may lower the succeeding temperance from the realm of pleasure to that of a distasteful and curative necessity. He had evidently discovered that spare diet, short slumbers, rigorous restraint, leave, when the first tremors and

cravings of the discontented body are over, the mind pure and free and vigorous with great spring and plenitude of animal spirits, and not dulled or clouded by any of the fumes and humours that haunt the brain of the full-blooded, easy liver. On the other hand, he, no doubt, suffered from the vague and delicious melancholy common to austere souls and eremitic frames; it is a common mistake to speak of music as solacing or charming away such melancholy-it is not so; music is potent to lift the black clouds, the gloomy horrors of morbid melancholy, resulting on mental exhaustion or physical prostration; but the dreamy, pensive mood, a condition of high and exalted delight, needs no curing; it is fed by music, strenuously bruising the sweetness out of it, the harmony and the rhythm working up the soul to a purified ecstasy far different from the blind and animal rapture induced on merely sensuous natures.

Now, the reason why we look with a regretful longing at such an exile, such a sojourn on Patmos as Milton's was, is twofold. We are genuinely charmed by the beauty as well as the rightness and simplicity of a life lived within so secluded a pale; and then there comes another feeling; we admire it because it would be so impossible for ourselves, so intolerable; not because we could not, if we would, step aside from career and place and the struggling world, but because we know we dare not; because such a life is too arduous, too exacting for us. A life apart, if spent in indolence is so inglorious a thingand we feel that we should so easily slip into that; and thus jaded by the stress of circumstances we peer into such a remote region as this, and wish we had strength and courage to share it too. We know what we would fain pursue; but public feeling, and the lower and apparently simpler issue of staying where we are rushes over us, and we are drawn away again.

Yet if it has been a dream, it has

been a sweet one, to see the young scholar trudging home through the summer twilight, watching the stars come out above the orchards, and the bats flap noiselessly about the warm dusk, while the pleasant country sounds fall fainter and fainter over the fields and running water, till at last there is nothing to be heard but the gurgle of the brimming stream in its pools, and under its long grasses; the sigh of the elms in the fragrant air, and the sound of distant wheels, louder and fainter alternately, speeding some belated traveller home. "What God has resolved concerning me I know not, but this at least; He has instilled into me, at all events, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labour, as the fables have it, is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpine, as I am wont day and night to seek for the idea of the beautiful (hanc τοῦ καλοῦ ἰδέαν) through all the forms or faces of things (for many are the shapes of things divine)." So wrote Milton on a June evening from Horton, stung, it may have been, into speech by the tormenting beauty of the summer twilight.

And we who pursue her too, though faintly and with less heart, where could we find her better than in the picture of the life that imaged this constant thought? We seem to be very near her; almost to clutch the fringe of her garments and comprehend the vanishing form.

But our reverie too must have an end. A clock peals its summons from a red Colnbrook roof, undistinguishably grey in the evening colouring; the setting sun is doing his best to atone for the Vandalism of the wind by gilding the ragged cloud-terraces an angry red. It seems as if a mighty spirit had been abroad, drawing all who were attuned in mood and will into consonance with him. Let us creep home in silence, for he has passed over and gone by.