Milton | Page 6

poets, fond of bringing
more or less concealed autobiography into his poetry, but still more in
his prose works he inclines often to insert long passages about himself,
his studies, travels, projects, friends and character. It is these more than
anything else which now keep those works alive: and, coming from a
man so proudly truthful as Milton evidently was, they are of the
greatest interest and value. The second reason why we know so much
about him is that he played an active part in politics, a far more certain
way of {24} attracting contemporary attention in England than writing
Hamlet or building St. Paul's Cathedral. And the third is that his life has
been made the subject of perhaps the most minute and elaborate
biography in the language. Mr. Masson's labours enable us to know, if

we choose, every fact, however insignificant, which the most laborious
investigation can discover, not only about Milton himself but, one may
almost say, about everybody who was ever for five minutes in Milton's
company.
From this mass of material, all that can be touched here is a few of the
most salient facts of the life and the most striking features of the
character.
Milton's life is naturally divided into three periods. The first is that of
his education and early poems. It extends from his birth in 1608 to his
return from his foreign travels in 1639. The second is that of his
political activity, and extends from 1639 to the Restoration. The third is
that of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson. It concludes
with his death, on November 8, 1674.
Milton was born on December 9, 1608, at a house in Bread Street,
Cheapside. The house is gone, but the street is a very short one, and it
is still pleasant to step out of the {25} roar of Cheapside into its
quietness, and think that there, on the left, close by, under the shadow
of Bow Church, was born the greatest poet to whom the greatest city of
the modern world has given birth. London ought to hold fast to the
honour of Milton, for his honour is peculiarly hers. He was not only
born a Londoner but lived in London nearly all his life. And his mind is
throughout that of the citizen. Neither agriculture nor sport means
much to him; and, much as he loves the sights and sounds of the open
country, his allusions to them are those of the delighted but still
wondering alien, not those of the native. None is more often quoted
than the passage in the ninth book of Paradise Lost--
"As one who, long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and
sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms Adjoined, from each thing met
conceives delight-- The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine, Or
dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound-- If chance with nymph-like
step fair virgin pass, What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look sums all delight."

{26} And the secret of its charm obviously lies partly in the note of a
personal experience. Just in that way must Milton, as boy and man,
have often issued forth from the weariness of his studies and the noise
and confinement of the streets, for a walk among the open fields that
then lay so close at hand for the Londoner. And perhaps, as the
inhabitants of towns often do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows
unknown to those who saw them every day. The present Poet Laureate,
who has spent most of his life in the country, has asked a question to
which it is not easy for the countryman to give the answer he would
like--
"Whose spirit leaps more high, Plucking the pale primrose, Than his
whose feet must fly The pasture where it grows?"
If the town-dweller never attains to that mystical communion with the
secret soul of Nature which Wordsworth and such as Wordsworth owe
to a life spent in the "temple's inmost shrine," yet his eye, undulled by
familiarity, commonly sees more in trees and flowers than the eyes of
nearly all those who live every day among them. At its highest
familiarity breeds intimacy, but more often what it breeds is
indifference. A man who {27} reads the Bible for the first time in
middle life will never live inside it as some saints have lived; but he
will see much that is hidden from most of those who have been reading
it every day since they could read at all.
Milton remained in London, so far as we know, for the first sixteen
years of his life. He was educated at St.