Milton

Milton, by John Bailey

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Title: Milton
Author: John Bailey
Release Date: August 9, 2007 [EBook #22286]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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Produced by Al Haines

MILTON
BY
JOHN BAILEY
AUTHOR OF "THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY," "DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE," ETC.

LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

[Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99. For its Index, a page number has been placed only at the start of that section.]

First printed Spring 1915

CONTENTS
CHAP.
I INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 II MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER . . . . . . . . . . . 28 III THE EARLIER POEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 IV PARADISE LOST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 V PARADISE REGAINED AND SAMSON AGONISTES . . . 190 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee; she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea; Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life's common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay. WORDSWORTH.

O Mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies, O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity, God-gifted organ-voice of England, Milton, a name to resound for ages; Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel, Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries, Tower, as the deep-doomed empyrean Rings to the roar of an angel onset-- Me rather all that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring, And bloom profuse and cedar arches Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean, Where some refulgent sunset of India Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle, And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods Whisper in odorous heights of even. TENNYSON.

{7}
MILTON
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
When a man spends a day walking in hilly country he is often astonished at the new shape taken on by a mountain when it is looked at from a new point of view. Sometimes the change is so great as to make it almost unrecognizable. He who has seen Snowdon from Capel-Curig is reluctant to admit that what he sees from Llanberis is the same mountain: he who has seen the Langdale Pikes from Glaramara is amazed at their beauty as he gazes at them from the garden at Low Wood. These are extreme cases. But to a less degree every traveller among the mountains is experiencing the same thing all day. He finds the eternal hills the most plastic of forms. At each change in his own position there is a change in the shape of a mountain under which he is passing. He may keep his eye fixed upon it but insensibly, as he watches, the long {8} chain will become a vertical peak, the jagged precipice a round green slope.
Much the same process goes on as the generations of men pass on their way, with their eyes fixed, as they cannot help being, on the great human heights of their own and earlier days. Many of these look great only when you are close to them. At a little distance they are seen to be small and soon they disappear altogether. The true mountains remain but they do not keep the same shape. Each succeeding generation sees the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly the same as that of its predecessor. Each age reshapes for itself its conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which includes them all. Of some of the masters in each of these worlds it feels that they belong not to their own generation only but