teen miles to the southwest of London; here, amid rural sights and sounds, Milton was to spend the next five years, the happiest of his life.

II

HORTON PERIOD, 1632-1638

It was fortunate for the harmonious development of Milton's genius that during the critical years between youth and manhood, years which in most men's lives are fullest of turmoil and dubiety, he was enabled to live a life of quiet contemplation. His nature was fiercely polemical, and without this period of calm set between his college life and his life as a public disputant, the sweeter saps of his mind would never have come to flower and fruitage. It was particularly fortunate, too, that this interim should be passed in the country, where the lyric influences were softest, where all that was pastoral and genial in his imagination was provoked. The special danger of men of his stamp, in whom will and doctrine are constantly president over impulse, is the loss of plasticity, the stiffening of imagination in its bonds. His "long holiday" at Horton left Milton free to capture in verse the ductile grace of youth, to have his leafy season. Afterward his work was to be less a sylvan growth, and more a monumental thing builded with hands.

The narratable facts of these five years are naturally few. Milton says himself that he "spent a long holiday turning over the Latin and Greek authors," and some volumes annotated by him have been preserved to show the wide range of reading indicated. The most notable additions to his treasury of thought were contributed by Euripides and Plato. He made occasional visits to London, for instruction in music and mathematics, to purchase books, to visit the theatres, and to call upon his married sister Anne Phillips or his younger brother Christopher, now entered as barrister at the Inner Temple. The facts of real significance, however, are the ones which cannot be chronicled, the drama which goes on in every sensitive life between the individual soul and the spirit of nature. The episodes are nothing, a ramble by starlight along a piece of water, a nesting bird surprised in the hedge, a speaking light at dawn, but the results, when the one actor is young enough to meet the eternal youth of the other, are not to be measured. In the beautiful Sonnet to the Nightingale we see the habitual seriousness of Milton's nature invaded by the tenderness and soft vague passion of spring in the country; it has a troubadour grace and wistfulness discernible nowhere else among his utterances. More characteristically and with equal beauty, these new influences found expression in the twin poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, named from the two typical moods of mind in which the poet confronts the pageantry of nature, the mood of joyous receptivity and the mood of sober contemplation. In the studied symmetry of these poems, their contrapuntal answering of part to part, as well as in the objective standpoint from which they are written, there is a selfconsciousness alien to the born nature poet. Such a poet indeed Milton was not.

He sees nature neither with the spiritual insight of Wordsworth nor with the childlike absorption and awe of his contemporary Henry Vaughan. Standing outside nature, he uses its spectacles as text and illustration of a mood which has its origin within. He does not even draw illustration exclusively from those sights which met his eye in the landscape about Horton, but borrows eclectically, wherever in visible nature or in scenes remembered from books he finds matter to his purpose. In any exact sense, therefore, these poems are not personal. In a larger sense they are profoundly so. They are the record of a serious, scholarly mind suddenly invaded in a propitious moment of youth by the beauty of external exist. ence, - a beauty gay or sober, as chance may determine, but always richly solicit ing. In a letter to Diodati, written from Horton, Milton says: "God. . . has instilled into me, if into any one, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labor. . . is Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpina, as it is my habit day and night to seek for this idea of the beautiful . . . through all the forms and faces of things." Such pure æstheticism has on his lips a somewhat alien sound. We seem to be listening to the author of Endymion, rather than tc the author of Comus.

Mark Pattison was the first of Milton's biographers to give sufficient emphasis to the pathos which these poems derive from the fact that in them, for the first and last time, Milton spoke in the free, joyous spirit of the time which was passing away forever. Even here, to be sure, the mood is chastened and objectified; but taken broad and long, in their lightness, their grace, their eager response to sensuous beauty, these poems are of the great lyric age inaugurated by Spenser, though they show a sense of form and an economy of expression which Spenser's diffuser muse could not attain. When we look forward fifteen years and see Milton grimly seconding the movements of a party whose fanaticism crushed out the joy and poetry of life in England, cut down the Maypoles, closed the theatres, broke the stainedglass windows, and tore out the organ-pipes, the lines which celebrate the "jocund rebeck," the "well-trod stage," and the "storied windows richly dight," take on a peculiar significance. The man who was to be the pamphleteer champion and the bard of Puritanism is living here in the world of romantic charm which Cromwell's armies were to sweep away. The man who had written the Sonnet to the Nightingale was to turn that "small lute" into a trumpet whence he might blow soul-animating strains of strenuous applause.

Either shortly before or shortly after Milton left college he had been asked, probably by young Henry Lawes, at that time gentleman of the Chapel Royal and one of the King's private musicians, to furnish a portion of the words for an entertainment to be presented before the Countess Dowager of Derby, at her country-seat of Harefield, by the younger members of her family. The libretto which Milton furnished is the fragment known as Arcades, or the Arcadians. Harefield lay only ten miles from Horton, and it is possible that Milton may have been present on the night when the actors in the little masque, disguised as shepherds and sylvan deities, and carrying torches in their hards, approached the aged countess, seated

in state at the end of the historic avenue of elms known as the Queen's walk. The aged dowager had in her youth been Spenser's friend; and it is pleasant to dwell, with Professor Masson, upon the possibility that the eyes which had seen the first saw now also the last of the great line of Elizabethan minstrels. In any case, Lawes was so well satisfied with Milton's words that three or four years later he applied for a more elaborate piece of work of the same sort, this time to celebrate the inauguration of the countess's son-in-law, the Earl of Bridgewater, into his duties as Lord President of Wales. Lawes had under his instruction the Lady Alice, youngest daughter of the earl, as well as her sister and two brothers; he desired to put their accomplishments to service in the production of a masque gorgeous enough to suit the august occasion. The heartiness with which Milton threw himself into his part of the project is evidenced by the rich and rounded beauty of the result. He never gave his work a definite title, but it is named in modern editions from the chief dramatis persona, Comus, the god of revelry. All efforts to discover whether or not the young author was present when his masque was given in the banqueting-hall of the historic castle of Ludlow, on the Welsh border, have been futile.

The main motive of the poem, the power of chastity to subdue the forces of evil, is a conventional one in the literature of the time. It is only in occasional passages of deeper conviction that we can see the growth of Milton's mind away from the idyllicism of L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, toward the polemic sternness which, after announcing itself in golden adumbrations of melody in Lycidas, was to go on gathering intensity and losing beauty until its ugly culmination in the Reply to Salmasius. In the light of Milton's later development, the very fact of authorship in the masque form shows the irony of events. These poem-pageants summed up all that was most gorgeous, extravagant, and pleasure-loving in the court life of the Tudors and the Stuarts. They had always constituted a covert protest against the Puritan barrenness and strictness of life, and shortly before Comus was written, this protest had become overt. The attack made by the Puritan barrister Prynne upon the stage, in his Histriomastix, had given offence to the court; a passage of ponderous invective against women-players was interpreted as an insult to the Queen, who had shortly before taken part in a masque at Whitehall. The result was a revival of the masque by court sympathizers, on a scale of unprecedented splendor, and the masque became a kind of rallying point for cavalier feeling. Comus belongs certainly by date and probably by intention to this demonstration against the Puritan party. It is indicative of the quiescence of Milton's mind at this time with respect to the political situation, that he should have lent his powers unwittingly to such a task.

The next three years of Milton's life at Horton were unproductive. He continued that elaborate course of intellectual and spiritual preparation which he had marked out for himself, fortifying himself in all ways for the greater task which vaguely beckoned. To Charles Diodati he writes, in response to an inquiry as to what he is thinking of, "Why, may God help me, of immortality! I am growing

my wings for a flight." For broad flight he was not yet ready, and for lesser ones the sting of occasion was lacking, until the autumn of 1637. Then news came of the sinking of a ship in the Irish Sea, and the loss of all on board, including Edward King, a fellow of Christ's and an old college-mate of Milton's. King's Cambridge friends determined to issue a little volume of commemorative verse, to which Milton, as a recent graduate, was asked to contribute. It is an odd experience now to turn over the pages of this little volume, and, after reading the wellmeaning heaviness of which it is mainly composed, to come suddenly at the end upon the large threnodic rhythm of the opening lines of Lycidas. Lycidas has been called by so competent a critic as the late Mr. Pattison, the highwater mark, not only of Milton's genius, but of English lyric poetry. Superlatives are dangerous, and never more so than when dealing with work of a commanding order. It is perhaps more to our purpose to note what the same critic has suggestively pointed out, that in this poem the world of Milton's youth and the world of his manhood meet. The general tone of the lament is indistinguishable from that of the ordinary pastoral threnodies of the school of Spenser. There is the same air of deliberate convention, the same pensive beauty, the same delicious melancholy grace in the wearing of the rue. But once past the induction we come upon lines which apprise us that we are in the presence of a sterner moral conception than ever troubled the smooth pipes of the early pastoralists. In the passage beginning "Last came and last did go

The pilot of the Galilean lake,"

there is a "smothered and suspended menace," a passion of purification, which was soon to wreak itself upon everything in Church and State for which the House of Stuart stood, and to sweep away in its blind zeal much that was beautiful and desirable. It was to take, among other good things, that very gift of pure melody which was given to Milton's youth. He was to come out of the struggle strengthened to grapple with a vast theme, but stiffened and shorn of grace. He was to live to build language into large harmonic masses, intricate and solemn fugues, but never to recapture that simple singing voice which charms us in the poems written during his "long holiday" at Horton.

TOWARD the end of his fifth year at Horton, Milton began to feel the cramping intellectual conditions of life in the country and to think of taking chambers in London. This project he soon abandoned for the wider one of foreign travel. The expenses of the trip were borne by his father, with that generous acquiescence which he had always shown in his son's plans of self-improvement. After a short stay in Paris Milton proceeded to Italy, then the seat of a decaying but still splen did civilization, and even richer then than now in beauty.

At Florence, where he tarried for two months, some metrical trifles in Latin, which he managed to patch up on demand, were received with egregious flattery by the various "academies " or literary clubs, where the shallow intellectual life of the time was chiefly centred. The definite eulogiums of his Florentine friends, as for instance the declaration by Francini that by virtue of these Latin poems Thames may rival Helicon, are in a tone of elaborate compliment too patently conventional to have been intended for literal interpretation. Taken broadly, however, they doubtless testify, as has been said, to a genuino impression of power made by the young English poet upon men of a temperament very alien to his own. Whatever amount of sincerity may really have attached to these panegyrics, it is certain from an interesting passage in Milton's pamphlet on Church Government, published three years later, that they added materially to his own confidence in his powers. The passage is one of many indications, hitherto unemphasized by his biographers, that in spite of his haughty self-reliance and self-assertion Milton was exceedingly sensitive to influences from without.

In Rome, whither he proceeded in November of 1638, he was treated with a distinction by no means calculated to lessen this feeling. He mentions with some complaisance his reception at a magnificent concert given by Cardinal Barberini, who "himself waiting at the door and seeking me out in so great a crowd, almost laying hold of me by the hand, admitted me within in a truly most honorable manner." It was here that he heard the famous singer Leonora Baroni, commemorated in his Latin epigrams, and possibly in the Italian sonnet beginning, —

"Diodati, e te 'l diro con maraviglia,"

a passage which would seem to show that this lady shared with the unknown beauty of Bologna to whom the other sonnets are addressed, the honor of an inroad upon the Puritan poet's austere but susceptible heart. From Rome his journey lay

to Naples; here he was entertained by the aged Marquis Manso, a munificent patron of letters who had sheltered Tasso and given aid to Marini. The exchange of courtesies between the two at parting elicited one of Milton's most elegant Latin poems, memorable as containing explicit mention of a plan then maturing in his mind for an epic poem on the legendary history of King Arthur. Incidentally, a glimpse is given us of Milton's uncompromising frankness in the expression of his religious opinions; the marquis accompanies his parting gift of two richly wrought cups with the hint that his guest's outspokenness has made it impossible for him to extend a fitting hospitality.

Plans for an extended trip eastward to Greece and Palestine were cut short by serious political news from England. King Charles was about to start on his first expedition against the Scots. Milton knew enough of the acute condition of affairs in the kingdom to realize the serious nature of such a move, and started northward, thinking it shame, he says, to be taking his pleasure while his countrymen were fighting for their liberty. His return was leisurely enough, however, to allow of a two months' delay at Florence, made memorable by his meeting with Galileo.