"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