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 MILTON'S SONNETS 
 
 ALDEN SAMPSON 
 
 NEW-YORK 
 
 THE DE V1NNE PRESS 
 1886
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS 
 
 ALDEN SAMPSON 
 
 .NEW-YORK 
 
 THE DE VINNE PRESS 
 
 1886
 
 rj
 
 STACK 
 ANW 
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 A PAPER READ BEFORE THE ASSOCIATION OF THE HAVERFORD 
 ALUMNI, IN ALUMNI HALL, HAVERFORD COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA, 
 ON THE EVENING OF THE TWENTY-FIRST OF JUNE, 1 886, BY 
 
 ALDEN SAMPSON, A. M. (Ha-cerford and Harvard). 
 
 FOR twenty years of Milton's life, embracing the 
 period, namely, of his middle life, from the 
 year in which he wrote Lycidas, 1637, until the 
 year in which we know he was continuously at work 
 upon Paradise Lost, 1658, he wrote no original Eng- 
 lish verse, except in the form of sonnets. 
 
 During this time he also wrote half a dozen Italian 
 sonnets. Both of these groups I shall briefly consider, 
 as well as the circumstances under which some of them 
 were written, so far as it is necessary for a correct 
 understanding of them, and perhaps may dwell some- 
 what upon the merits and limitations of the form in 
 which he wrote. In what I say of the Sonnet in gen- 
 eral, I shall invoke the aid of the poets themselves who 
 have written such verse. 
 
 '5
 
 1 6 MILTON 1 S SONNETS. 
 
 I have heard it urged against the Sonnet that it does 
 not answer Herbert Spencer's axiomatic test of excel- 
 lence in form, the requirement of performance with 
 least necessary expenditure of power in expression. 
 To that objection there is sufficient answer. 
 
 On the one hand, as Wordsworth says in writing of 
 the Sonnet, 
 
 The prison unto which we doom 
 Ourselves, no prison is. 
 
 Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room, 
 And hermits are contented with their cells, 
 And students with their pensive citadels ; 
 Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, 
 Sit blithe and happy ; bees that soar for bloom 
 High as the highest peak of Furness Fells 
 Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells : 
 In truth, the prison, unto which we doom 
 Ourselves, no prison is ; and hence to me, 
 In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound 
 Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground ; 
 Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) 
 Who have felt the weight of too much liberty 
 Should find brief solace there, as I have found. 
 
 When once a poet has mastered the sonnet form, a 
 definite mould into which to shape his thought is an 
 aid rather than a hindrance. Instead of having a little 
 left over, when he has reached his limit of fourteen 
 lines, or running a trifle short, as some seem to imagine 
 he might do, he instinctively knows with perfect sure- 
 ness, before a line has definitely shaped itself in his
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 17 
 
 mind, whether or not the subject is suited to his pur- 
 pose. A master of the Sonnet has called it 
 
 The feeling from the bosom thrown 
 In perfect shape. 
 
 (WORDSWORTH, Dedication to Sonnets.") 
 
 On the other hand, the sonnet form is an immense 
 advantage to the reader, who is surely to be considered 
 in the matter, for there cannot be poems without 
 readers any more than an eagle could exist with- 
 out doves and white, innocent rabbits to feed upon. 
 Readers are the natural and legitimate prey of poets, 
 and, in relation to the poets, answer the purpose of 
 their creation just so far as they appreciatively read 
 what the former have written ; the old-fashioned idea 
 that it was the other way about, and that there were 
 poets for the delectation of readers, is all a mistake. 
 Poets that are worthy of the name write because it is 
 their passion to do so, and because they cannot help 
 themselves, and not primarily for the sake of being 
 read, they would write whether they were read or 
 not; but in order for the poem to be preserved, and for 
 the author to feel the reflex inspiration to be derived from 
 appreciation and sympathy, there must be at least one 
 reader besides the poet himself; he is a sort of neces- 
 sary evil, often making ill return, however, for what he 
 receives, being over-exacting and carping. Therefore, 
 although the poet is bound not to consider the reader 
 in the choice and treatment of his subject, but is to 
 be a law unto himself therein, yet it behooves him 
 to conciliate his reader in the matter of form, and so 
 2
 
 1 8 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 far as he is able, to smooth the way for him in this 
 regard. 
 
 It is here that we see the positive advantages of the 
 Sonnet. In the first place, the absence of obscurity, 
 which is a rigid canon of this class of verse, and the 
 length confined to fourteen lines, ensure, so far as any- 
 thing the poet does can ensure, the sustained attention 
 of the reader to the end. And, in the second place, 
 the identity of form, after it is once mastered by the 
 reader, frees him from the disadvantages of irregularity 
 and surprise, so that he is enabled to give his undivided 
 attention to the meaning of the sonnet, and to what- 
 ever beauty of expression it may contain. If any one 
 doubt this, let him take up Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical 
 Sonnets, where in each successive stanza, for the son- 
 nets here form a succession of stanzas, is rendered a 
 sharply drawn picture from English history, presented 
 in an atmosphere of reflection almost demanded by the 
 nature of the sestet, with the requirements of which 
 no one was more familiar than Wordsworth, and 
 without the forty, or hundred and forty, discursive and 
 tediously didactic lines, which would inevitably inter- 
 vene, or come in this proportion to the fourteen lines 
 of a sonnet, if this were the Excursion. 
 
 One of the most exquisite little beasts that I ever 
 saw was a crab, which I dug out of a sand bank during 
 a desultory stroll along the beach at Old Point Com- 
 fort, Virginia, A little entrance in the side of the 
 bank and a vanishing hole bespoke an inhabitant, and 
 tempted exploration. With as much care lest I should 
 lose its course, in the clear, cool, characterless sand, as 
 if I were reading the Excursion, and feared to lose its
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 19 
 
 thread of interest, I persevered inward and downward, 
 until at last, instinct with life, of a pale gray, not unlike 
 the sand itself, save that the sun revealed on its moist 
 back the iridescent tints of the opal, the occupant of the 
 mysterious burrow stood revealed. You cannot expect 
 me in words of description to convey the pleasure 
 which a creature so perfect and so dainty would 
 awaken. 
 
 Now the difference between Wordsworth's Sonnets 
 and much of his other verse, in the fifty or sixty thou- 
 sand lines which he wrote, is that, in the Prelude or in 
 the Excursion for instance, you have to dig for your 
 crabs, while the first glance at the Sonnets reveals 
 their charm, and commands your admiration. 
 
 I shall not enter into any general discussion of the 
 merits of this style of composition, or spend much time 
 in definition. Everybody knows a sonnet when he 
 sees it, and perhaps it is sufficient that they who write 
 sonnets should understand the grammar of construction 
 to which they must conform. 
 
 Those rules are fixed and arbitrary. Perhaps it will 
 be sufficient for our purpose to say that two quatrains 
 and two tercets have been found to be the form which 
 most effectively presents the matter of the Sonnet. At 
 the most, six rhymes are allowed, three in the octave 
 and three in the sestet, although the requirements of 
 the more strict and elegant manner would limit the 
 number to four or five, allowing only two in the octave, 
 and three or two rhymes in the sestet, either variety 
 being perhaps equally good. 
 
 The rule of arrangement of rhymes according to the 
 Italian or 'Guittonian' form in the octave allows of no
 
 20 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 deviation; the form of the sestet is less arbitrary, its 
 function allows of quicker and freer action, and of 
 greater variety of rhyme. Wordsworth, who most care- 
 fully studied the possibilities of the Sonnet, allowed 
 himself great latitude in the sestet ; I had the curiosity 
 to count the variations of arrangement of rhyme in the 
 sestet in sixty of his sonnets chosen from a selection 
 made without regard to this feature, the sixty namely 
 in Matthew Arnold's abridgment of Wordsworth's 
 Poems, and found in that number sixteen varieties of 
 arrangement employed. 
 
 In regard to the substance of the Sonnet there can 
 be 'no deviation from the rule which requires that it 
 shall express but a single thought or feeling 
 
 A Sonnet is a moment's monument, 
 
 Memorial from the Soul's eternity 
 
 To one dead, deathless hour. Look that it be, 
 
 Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, 
 
 Of its own intricate fullness reverent; 
 
 Carve it in ivory or in ebony, 
 
 As Day or Night prevail; and let Time see 
 
 Its flowering crest impearled and orient. 
 
 A Sonnet is a coin: its face reveals 
 
 The Soul, its converse, to what Power 'tis due: 
 
 Whether, for tribute to the august appeals 
 
 Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, 
 
 It serve; or 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, 
 
 In Charon's palm it pay the toll to death. 
 
 (ROSSETTI.) 
 
 The typical sonnet states and develops its subject in 
 the first and second quatrains; this being the end of
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 21 
 
 the octave, there should occur a slight pause before 
 entering upon the sestet, which should approach the 
 thought upon another and higher level, and in the typ- 
 ically perfect sonnet does so. Shakspere, although 
 quite ignoring the correct form, as a rule instinctively 
 observes the pause after the octave, and advances the 
 thought to a higher stage in the sestet. The progress 
 of the octave and sestet has been likened to the mo- 
 tion in rise and descent of a ball; the momentary pause 
 at the turn of the ball, where it seems to stop to think 
 about going home again, is that at the end of the 
 octave. The simile just fails of being a perfect one, 
 but if I may be permitted to indulge in epigram, a 
 sonnet written on this plan falls into the vice of epi- 
 gram itself, the action comes to the end with a crash, 
 instead of quietly lapsing, as it ought to do, its purpose 
 fulfilled. 
 
 Nothing better will be written about this phase of 
 the Sonnet than the following, the sestet of one by 
 Theodore Watts: 
 
 A sonnet is a wave of melody: 
 
 From heaving waters of the impassioned soul 
 
 A billow of tidal music one and whole 
 
 Flows in the 'octave'; then returning free, 
 
 Its ebbing surges in the 'sestet' roll 
 
 Back to the depths of Life's tumultuous sea. 
 
 To compare small things with great, and if I may be 
 permitted to say so without irreverence, which I think 
 can hardly be detected, the sestet should bear the same 
 relation to the octave that the New Testament does to
 
 22 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 the Old ; it should be the fulfilment and consummation 
 of the former's hopes and promise. The purpose of the 
 former is to prepare our minds for the reflection, inspi- 
 ration, lesson, or revelation held in the latter. 
 
 With such possibilities, it is not surprising that, in a 
 field which has been so assiduously worked as this has 
 been, many of the choicest gems of English poesy 
 should be found. 
 
 Scorn not the Sonnet ; Critic, you have frowned 
 Mindless of its just honours : with this key 
 Shakspere unlocked his heart ; the melody 
 Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound ; 
 A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound ; 
 With it Camoens soothed an exile's grief; 
 The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf 
 Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned 
 His visionary brow ; a glow-worm lamp 
 It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land 
 To struggle through dark ways ; and when a damp 
 Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand 
 The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew 
 Soul-animating strains alas! too few. 
 
 (WORDSWORTH. ) 
 
 The necessity for terse utterance, combined with the 
 other requirements which I have mentioned, makes it 
 perfectly adapted for the expression of love, in whose 
 service it was devised, and will always be employed ; 
 for eulogy ; for philosophic reflection, if the philosophy 
 be clothed in the garb of imaginative language ; for 
 the expression of delight of any sort; for any strong 
 emotion, provided always that a sonnet contain not 
 more than a single thought or emotion, that it do
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 23 
 
 not offend the unities. It may hold within itself intri- 
 cacies to baffle a single perusal. Shakspere's sonnets 
 contain subtleties to baffle repeated and careful study, 
 and yet there can be no doubt but that he employed 
 this medium of expression with a perfectly clear appre- 
 ciation of its mysterious capabilities. 
 
 The art of sonnet-making is a mystery just as 
 much a mystery as coat-making was in the Middle 
 Ages. Those who know in what lies the secret of suc- 
 cess, of course have been more discreet than to reveal 
 it, or have couched their revelation in properly myste- 
 rious words. In answer to the riddle which he himself 
 propounds, ' What is a sonnet ? ' a writer still living* 
 expresses himself in metaphors, using the form of whose 
 essence he interrogates. 
 
 'Tis the pearly shell 
 That murmurs of the far-off murmuring sea. 
 
 ***** 
 
 This was the flame that shook with Dante's breath ; 
 
 The solemn organ whereon Milton played, 
 
 And the clear glass where Shakspere's shadow falls ; 
 
 A sea this is beware who ventureth ! 
 
 For like a fjord the narrow floor is laid 
 
 Deep as mid ocean to the sheer mountain walls. 
 
 I think it is Gosse who speaks of this as an 'age of 
 flourishing sonneteers.' It would do for him to speak 
 in mild disparagement, for he has written some very 
 good sonnets himself. But it is well for us not to over- 
 look the fact that in no one department of verse does 
 this century excel more fully than in the Sonnet, and 
 only one other period, the Elizabethan, at all compares 
 
 Richard Watson Gilder.
 
 24 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 with it in productiveness. In form the Sonnet was then 
 crude, and in substance was limited to a narrow realm. 
 To-day it is the fashion, and has countless admirers. 
 Every poet of the century has added to the number 
 of those already written, and new ones challenge our 
 admiration constantly; in fact a number of the Academy 
 now without a fairly good one is the exception. 
 
 Mr. Waddington quotes a writer in the Westminster 
 jRevieiv, whom he endorses, calling attention to the 
 resemblance, 'making allowance for altered circum- 
 stances,' between the English Sonnet and the Greek 
 Epigram, and saying that the Sonnet is taking the 
 place with us which the Epigram held in the literature 
 of the Greeks. In both 'style is put under high pres- 
 sure,' (Lytton); 'Of both it may be said, in the words of 
 an old author, that although a little thing gives pleasure, 
 perfection is not a little thing.' (Saml. Waddington.) 
 
 The Sonnet is almost a touchstone for profound emo- 
 tion. The spurious in this garb is revealed at once. 
 If the clown would escape detection let him not don 
 the habit of the prince. Intense feeling here can allow 
 itself a voice, guarded by dignity of expression from the 
 betrayal of weakness, or from falling into lack of self- 
 control. Even the most intense feeling can hardly be- 
 come hysterical in fourteen lines. 
 
 Allow me to recall to your mind, as examples of un- 
 questioned realness and intensity of feeling, many of 
 Rossetti's sonnets in the House of Life, Keats's Last 
 Sonnet, or that beginning 
 
 The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone :
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 25 
 
 Lowell's Sonnet on the death of his wife, or Words- 
 worth's in memory of his daughter 
 
 Surprised by joy impatient as the Wind 
 I turned to share the transport oh! with whom 
 But Thee, deep-buried in the silent tomb, 
 That spot which no vicissitude can find ? 
 
 or that one beginning 
 
 It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free; 
 The holy time is quiet as a Nun 
 Breathless with adoration : 
 
 that beginning 
 
 Another year! another deadly blow! 
 Another mighty Empire overthrown ! 
 
 or that other, 
 
 Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this hour : 
 England hath need of thee. 
 
 The present age regards the capabilities of this form 
 of verse in an altogether different light from that in 
 which its predecessors regarded them. The faults 
 which Addison points out for avoidance in the Epic or 
 Heroic Poem would be regarded to-day, strange as it 
 would formerly have seemed, as equally applicable to 
 the Sonnet. There are, Addison tells us, ' Two kinds 
 of thoughts which are carefully to be avoided. The
 
 26 MIL TON'S SONNETS. 
 
 first are such as are affected and unnatural ; the second 
 such as are mean and vulgar.' Until Milton's time, 
 affectation and artificiality were the very life's breath 
 of the Sonnet ; a life in death we deem it now. The 
 sonnets of Spenser and of Shakspere were artificial. 
 
 Every one must have noticed in examples of Egyp- 
 tian sculpture, the smile which the faces invariably bear, 
 and which I suppose was regarded by cultivated Egyp- 
 tians of those days as absolutely required by good 
 breeding. To preserve a composure of feature best 
 described as Grecian, would no doubt, to a man of the 
 world, of the Egyptian court at its prime, have seemed 
 rude and barbaric in the extreme. In like manner, 
 before Milton's day, to have written a sonnet in a per- 
 fectly straightforward, simple way, would have pro- 
 claimed the writer's ignorance of polite usage. 
 
 I remember an honoured professor of Law, who would 
 condemn the lack of artificial construction in a Bill or 
 Answer in Equity, and I recall the tone of approbation 
 with which he would commend the excellence of some 
 special pleading as being 'artificially drawn.' It was 
 a quality of the English Sonnet before Milton, that it 
 was 'artificially drawn'; he overcame that tradition, 
 and it is the merit of his sonnets that they are the nat- 
 ural, forcible utterance, recorded at the time, of emo- 
 tions actually felt, and not merely imagined by the poet 
 for the sake of expression in language which he has 
 at his command ; the exercise of an instinctive faculty 
 whose cultivation and indulgence are merely a source 
 of refined pleasure. 
 
 Milton's Sonnets, twenty-four in number, three hun- 
 dred and forty-two lines, are almost half as long as a
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 27 
 
 majority of the books of Paradise Lost, nearly twice 
 as long as Lycidas, almost exactly twice the length of 
 // Penseroso, and more than double that of L Allegro. 
 
 Of course the value of a poem does not depend upon 
 its length, nor can its importance be thereby gauged, 
 but it is interesting at least to see what part of a poet's 
 work any particular group of poems may form ; and 
 when we learn that the Sonnets are equal in length 
 to Lycidas and L Allegro together, we cannot at all 
 events dismiss them as an insignificant portion of Mil- 
 ton's work. The additional fact that their composition 
 was spread over nearly thirty years of the poet's life, 
 adds a peculiar sort of personal charm to them, and one 
 that is not associated with any other of his works. 
 Here we have verses written when he was a Cambridge 
 Bachelor of Arts, working for his Master's degree; 
 love sonnets in Italian, written when he was in the 
 full tide of scholarly popularity abroad, young, hand- 
 some, learned, already recognized in Italy as a poet of 
 distinction, and full of ambition for the future; son- 
 nets addressed to Cromwell, Fairfax, Vane ; sonnets 
 inspired by the stirring events of the times in which he 
 lived, as that upon the intended assault of the royal 
 army on London, and upon the occasion of the mas- 
 sacre of the Vaudois in the Alps ; sonnets inspired by 
 friendship; a touching sonnet on the occasion of his 
 blindness ; and, finally, one on the death of his dearly 
 beloved wife when he was fifty years of age. The Son- 
 nets at that time of his life formed more than an eighth 
 part of his entire poetical work, except what he wrote 
 in Latin and in Greek, and throwing out of account his 
 metrical version of the Psalms, which possesses this qual-
 
 28 MIL TON'S SONNETS. 
 
 ity in common with the vast majority of church hymns 
 and psalmody, that it is to be valued for something quite 
 different from poetry ; in fact is not poetry at all. 
 
 As we have often heard, had Milton died at the age 
 of Spenser, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, or Clough, 
 we should have had no Paradise Lost at all, nay even 
 had he died at the age of Shakspere, we should have 
 had only a few fragments of that poem. Had he died 
 before it was written, upon the Ode on the Nativity, 
 upon Comus, L Allegro, II Penseroso, Lycidas, and 
 some half a dozen of the Sonnets, his renown as a 
 writer of English verse of the first order would be 
 established ; having, however, written Paradise Lost, 
 everything of his past production at once starts forward 
 into new prominence, for a reason apart from its own 
 excellence, as being the work of England's one epic 
 poet, and as an assistance to understand the man 
 for that if for no other reason of great value. It is nec- 
 essary for us to recall these facts to estimate properly 
 the subject in hand, how far the Sonnets of Milton 
 reflect his character and the times in which they were 
 written, and how important they are as poetry. 
 
 The reason 'why Milton could not write a sonnet,' 
 said Dr. Johnson, sitting in solemn confab with a kin- 
 dred genius, Hannah More, was, that being possessed 
 of a ' genius that could hew a colossus out of a rock, 
 he could not carve heads on cherry-stones,' manag- 
 ing, in these few words, in the first place, to express 
 .his contempt for the Sonnet, unmindful of its due hon- 
 ours, and forgetting what Petrarch, Dante, and Shaks- 
 pere had written in this form, and in the second place, 
 to demonstrate his own dullness as a critic, for as a
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 29 
 
 matter of fact, among Milton's Sonnets are to be found 
 those same colossal qualities, the existence of which in 
 Paradise Lost he could not altogether ignore. 
 
 I once saw a countryman try to stop a runaway horse. 
 Failing in his purpose, and resolved to be a force if not 
 an assistant power, he hit the horse a smart blow with 
 his shovel as it escaped from him. Johnson's criticism 
 was as useful. He was making it more difficult instead 
 of easier for the less erudite public to master the very 
 points of excellence which it was his business to find 
 and capture for their service. 
 
 I have said that Dr. Johnson could not altogether 
 ignore the excellence of Paradise Lost, yet as a matter 
 of fact, he was unable to express admiration for that 
 poem without very serious qualifications. It is 'one of 
 the books,' he says, 'which the reader admires and lays 
 down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished 
 it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a 
 pleasure.' A criticism worthy of the literary editor of 
 the Cheyenne Boomerang, and as dangerous to its pro- 
 jector as the boomerang. 
 
 But it is in his estimate of Lycidas that Johnson 
 most fully succeeds in showing the worthlessness of 
 his strictures generally upon Milton; of Lycidas, since 
 selected, Hallam, for instance, says in his Literature of 
 Europe, by the suffrage of scholars and lovers of litera- 
 ture, as the poem par excellence in our language which 
 may serve as a test in a reader of genuine feeling for 
 what is really good in poetry, the one poem best suited 
 to prove an appreciation of those higher qualities of 
 poetry that must be felt to be realized, and which lie 
 beyond the province of demonstration altogether.
 
 30 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 'In this poem/ says Johnson, 'there is no nature, for 
 there is no truth ; there is no art, for there is nothing 
 new. Its form is that of a pastoral ; easy, vulgar, and 
 therefore disgusting ; whatever images it can supply 
 are long ago exhausted ; and its inherent improbability 
 always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.' Elsewhere 
 he said : ' Surely no man could have fancied that he 
 read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known the 
 author ! ' 
 
 Bearing in our recollection his estimate of Paradise 
 Zttf/and of Lycidas, we shall not be surprised at what he 
 says of the Sonnets. 'They deserve not any particular 
 criticism'; he informs us, 'forof the best it can only be said 
 that they are not bad ; and perhaps only the eighth and 
 twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commen- 
 dation.' He says elsewhere, 'Milton never learned the 
 art of doing little things with grace ; he overlooked 
 the milder excellence of suavity and softness; he was 
 a Lion that had no skill in dandling the Kid? again 
 striking wildly with the shovel of his wit. Johnson's 
 ponderous attempt to gambol, here, puts one in mind 
 of the continuation of the passage from which he adapts, 
 and its equally agile antics ; where for the amusement of 
 our first parents in their honeymoon 
 
 Th' unwieldy Elephant 
 To make them mirth used all his might, and wreathed 
 
 His lithe proboscis. 
 
 (P. L., IV., 345-7.) 
 
 We cannot forgive Johnson for his belittling criticism 
 of Milton, for it was evoked by ignoble motives. John- 
 son was a devout Royalist and churchman, Milton a
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 31 
 
 Republican and too extreme a Dissenter to find favour 
 long even among the Presbyterians ; Johnson hated him 
 on these grounds, and abused his autocratic power in 
 literature to throw him into disfavour. 
 
 Addison, by careful and discriminating praise, had 
 recalled people's flagging attention to the beauty and 
 supreme excellence of Paradise Lost ; Johnson undid 
 that work by unfair and unjust use of his power, (for he 
 and literature at that time were nearly synonymous,) 
 and brought him into disfavour again for half a century. 
 But there is no question now about the place he holds, 
 or about the merit of his Sonnets, 
 
 Soul-animating strains, alas ! too few, 
 
 Wordsworth calls them ; the late Archbishop Trench 
 describes them as the ' noblest in the English lan- 
 guage ' ; Palgrave says, ' Milton's ( Sonnets ) stand 
 supreme in stateliness.' I could cite numerous other 
 appreciative comments, "but it may be as well for us 
 to examine them for ourselves. 
 
 Although Milton wrote but twenty-four sonnets, in 
 the time before us^I think that it will be wise to con- 
 sider selections merely from that number. 
 
 The verses prefixed to the Shakspere folio of 1630, 
 only fourteen years after his death, beginning 
 
 What needs my Shakspere for his honoured bones, 
 The labour of an age in piled stones ? 
 
 sometimes classed among Milton's Sonnets, although 
 sixteen lines long and written in couplets, being there-
 
 32 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 fore not in the sonnet form at all, are yet in matter 
 composed somewhat upon the mould of Shakspere's 
 own, published twenty years before. Particularly the 
 conceit embodied in the last two couplets suggests his 
 manner, according to our idea of to-day, a bad one. 
 
 Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, 
 Dost make us marble with too much conceiving, 
 And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie, t 
 That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. 
 
 To illustrate the similarity of manner, compare the 
 following final couplet from one of Shakspere's Son- 
 nets: 
 
 And thou in this (my verse) shalt find thy monument, 
 When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent. 
 
 (CVIL, 13-14-) 
 
 It is interesting to mark that Milton ever wrote in 
 this way, since nothing is more characteristic of his 
 later style than careful avoidance of artificial poetical 
 abstractions and forced conceits, which so abound in 
 Shakspere's Sonnets, and that would be bearable only 
 when, as in his use of them, they are packed full of 
 meaning. Let any modern versifier shun their imita- 
 tion, unless he would stand convicted by contrast with 
 their force, of inevitable weakness and absurdity, all the 
 more apparent from comparison with Shakspere forced 
 upon the reader's notice by this very similarity. 
 
 In the sonnet to the Nightingale, usually called the 
 First Sonnet, and written when Milton was twenty-two 
 years of age, beginning,
 
 MILTON 'S SONNETS. 33 
 
 O Nightingale ! that on yon bloomy spray, 
 Warblest at eve when all the woods are still ; 
 Thou with fresh hope the lover's heart doth fill, 
 While the jolly hours lead on propitious May 
 
 Milton followed the accepted model of the time, and 
 wrote in the vein of Spenser's Amoretti, and of the 
 Italian sonnets, with which he was familiar. 
 
 To hear the nightingale before the cuckoo, was held 
 to 'portend success in love,' the poet says. 
 
 Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate 
 Foretell my hopeless doom in some grove nigh; 
 As thou from year to year hast sung too late 
 For my relief, yet hadst no reason why. 
 
 Milton's invocation, it proved, was fruitless, as he 
 remained unmarried for thirteen years ; it had been 
 well for him then had the liquid notes not reached his 
 ears, which 
 
 First heard before the shallow cuckoo's bill, 
 Portend success in love. 
 
 In this sonnet to love's messenger we find none of 
 the fire of Lycidas, written seven years later, where the 
 concrete 
 
 Tangles of Neaera's hair 
 
 throw into shadowy poetical indistinctness and insig- 
 3
 
 34 
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 nificance the pale abstraction embodied in the last and 
 best two lines of the sonnet 
 
 Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate, 
 Both them I serve and of their train am I. 
 
 Milton, blind, wifeless, and 'in disgrace with fortune 
 and in men's eyes,' threw a thousand times the youth- 
 ful fire into his praise of Eve when he came to write 
 Paradise Lost more than thirty years later. We find 
 what is lacking in this sonnet, somewhat of the volume 
 and surge of power which we have come to regard as 
 almost synonymous with the name of Milton, in the 
 Ode on Christ's Nativity, written the year before, and 
 while Milton was still a student at Cambridge, although 
 in this as in the verses to Shakspere and in the First 
 Sonnet, he had not escaped altogether from the ham- 
 pering influences of academic tradition. 
 
 Together in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice, 
 hang Titian's Visitation of St. Elizabeth, which he 
 began when he was fourteen years of age, and his 
 Entombment of Christ, upon which he was at work in 
 his ninety-ninth year: fitting monuments, marking the 
 beginning and end of that long and crowded life, a life 
 devoted to the service of Religion and of Art. 
 
 In like manner, it was fitting that Milton's first poet- 
 ical production above the rank of college exercise, 
 should be a Hymn on the Morning of the Nativity of 
 Christ. 
 
 It was the Winter wilde, 
 
 While the Heav'n-born Childe, 
 
 All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 35 
 
 the prelude of that career to be closed in solemn 
 grandeur by the simple elevation and dignity of the 
 Paradise Regained, wherein is portrayed the victory of 
 Christ over Satan and the declaring of his deity, the 
 story of man proved God, and 
 
 Recovered Paradise to all mankind, 
 By one man's firm obedience fully tried 
 Through all temptation. 
 
 It is necessary that I should quote from Milton, yet 
 I cannot hope in doing so to read you that which shall 
 possess the charm of freshness and surprise ; but after 
 all has been said, they are not the highest virtues which 
 verse may possess ; to him who knows his Shakspere 
 is a page of Macbeth less pleasant from acquaintance ! 
 Therefore, with no apology, I shall quote lines which 
 are familiar to all, sure of the approval of him who 
 knows them best. 
 
 For 'intricate fullness, 'for profundity, for subtlety, for 
 what may be called the metaphysics of poetry, there is 
 no comparison between the difficulties of Shakspere's 
 Sonnets and those of Milton ; yet in one way it is a 
 simpler task to treat of Shakspere's one hundred and 
 fifty-four sonnets than of Milton's twenty-four ; the 
 former are sequent stanzas of a poem, or of perhaps 
 three poems written in a similar vein, while each of 
 Milton's is an independent poem in itself, and it is nec- 
 essary to a great extent to treat them as separate poems. 
 In only two instances are they continuous, and the 
 second in both of these cases is written in quite a dif- 
 ferent vein from that in which the first is written.
 
 36 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 The second of Milton's Sonnets was written on the 
 occasion of his twenty-third birthday, 9 Dec., 1631. 
 
 How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth, 
 Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year. 
 
 This ' Petrarchian stanza,' as he characterizes it, was 
 sent to a friend who had tried to persuade Milton to 
 enter the church as a profession, and to do something, 
 instead of spending so much time in preparation for he 
 knew not what. 
 
 There can be no question but that Milton had the 
 highest estimation of the calling of the poet; his office 
 was that of the inspired seer rather than merely that of 
 the singer. The prayer of his youth was that of his 
 old age : 
 
 ( Do ) thou celestial light 
 
 Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers 
 Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence 
 Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell 
 Of things invisible to mortal sight. 
 
 (P. L., in., 51-5.) 
 
 And he felt equally confident of his own election to 
 this high calling. Deliberately and before his twenty- 
 third birthday, he had formed the determination to 
 write a great Epic Poem, such as Homer, Dante, and 
 Tasso had written, a purpose which he never relin- 
 quished; and he had in mind so early as 1640 the idea 
 of Paradise Lost. 
 
 It seems an exaggeration of modesty to say, as he 
 does in this Sonnet on his Twenty-third Birthday, that 
 his
 
 MfLTON'S SONNETS. 37 
 
 Late spring no bud or blossom shew'th, 
 
 for one who had, two years gone by, written the Ode on 
 Christ's Nativity, wherein, if verse ever contained the 
 echo of such, are heard celestial harmonies. On his 
 ears fell the majesty and the sweetness of the mystic 
 chants, whose ministrations before God's throne never 
 cease, the worship of his Angels, sons of light whose 
 
 Songs 
 
 And choral symphonies, day without night, 
 Circle his throne rejoicing. 
 
 (P. L.,V., 161-3.) 
 
 Reading this poem in properly attuned serenity of mind, 
 the reader shares the transport of its creation. We feel 
 that the music which the young poet invokes in fer- 
 vent devotion to greet his God, has touched his own 
 sense. His Muse has been permitted to join her voice 
 unto the Angel Choir. 
 
 Ring out, ye crystal spheres, 
 Once bless our human ears, 
 
 If ye have power to touch our senses so ; 
 And let your silver chime 
 Move in melodious time ; 
 
 And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow ; 
 And with your ninefold harmony, 
 Make up full consort to the angelic symphony. 
 
 In the Sonnet we are considering, modesty is shown 
 again, here rather a characteristic of the nation than of
 
 38 MIL TON'S SONNETS. 
 
 the individual, when he speaks of his approach to man- 
 hood on his twenty-third birthday; 
 
 Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth 
 That I to manhood am arrived so near. 
 
 We on this side of the water at all events, should 
 regard with suspicion the ingenuousness of a bachelor 
 of arts who on his twenty-third birthday should express 
 any doubts whatsoever that he were not a full-fledged 
 man. 
 
 Milton was distinguished for, and prided himself 
 upon, his manly beauty all his life. A Latin epigram 
 written on him by the scholar Manso in Naples when 
 he was thirty years old said of him, 
 
 Mind, form, face, grace, and morals are perfect. 
 
 (MASSON'S TRANSLATION.) 
 
 And years before, from the freshness of his complexion, 
 and generally youthful appearance, combined with the 
 propriety of his life, he was known at Cambridge as 
 the ' lady of Christ's.' 
 
 There is certainly every appearance of real modesty 
 when he says, 
 
 And inward ripeness doth much less appear 
 That some more timely happy spirits indu'th. 
 
 There can be no question but that the expression of 
 the last six lines is in serious earnest. They have the
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 39 
 
 solemnity of a prayer, and express the feeling which 
 guided his whole life. 
 
 Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, 
 
 It shall be still in strictest measure even 
 
 To that same lot however mean or high, 
 
 Toward which time leads me and the will of Heaven. 
 
 All is, if I have grace to use it so, 
 
 As ever in my great task-master's eye. 
 
 (SONNET II.) 
 
 The Ode on the Nativity of Christ, the verses On 
 Shakspere, the First and Second Sonnets were written 
 while Milton was still a student at Cambridge. 
 
 Fortunately his father's means made a fellowship 
 unnecessary for him, and after leaving the University, 
 he spent five years at Horton in study and in writing. 
 These have been called the years of preparation, but 
 they were, as well, most strikingly years of production, 
 during which were composed the Comus, Allegro, Pen- 
 scroso, and Lycidas. 
 
 Milton went abroad for travel in April, 1638, in his 
 thirtieth year, and was absent from home, chiefly in 
 Italy, a year and three months. Italian he had studied 
 before he went abroad, and while in Italy he read with 
 considerable thoroughness the literature of that coun- 
 try. At all events, he mastered the language suffi- 
 ciently to use it as a medium of expression in the 
 sonnets written while in Italy ; but then he had an all- 
 sufficient cause and stimulus ; in his own words, 
 
 This is the language in which love delights. 
 
 (CANZONE, COWPER'S TRANSLATION.)
 
 40 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 As in the twilight brown, on hillside bare, 
 
 Useth to go the little shepherd maid, 
 
 Watering some strange, fair plant, poorly displayed, 
 
 Not thriving in unwonted soil and air, 
 
 Far from its native springtime's genial care, 
 
 So on my ready tongue hath love assayed 
 
 Of a strange speech to wake new flower and blade. 
 
 (MACDONALD'S TRANSLATION.) 
 
 The few passages which I shall read from the Italian 
 sonnets will be in translations; of such I had six to 
 choose from, those namely of Langhorne, Cowper, 
 Strutt, Masson, Pattison, and MacDonald ; I dare say 
 there are others. Naturally the best of them only 
 approach the sonorous quality of Milton's own Eng- 
 lish, be it prose or verse. 
 
 Five Italian sonnets and a single canzone, like 
 enough to the sonnet to be here treated of among 
 them, written while in Italy, and inspired by a chaste 
 passion for some woman of the city of Bologna, whose 
 name we do not know, or possibly by the charm of 
 Italian beauty in the abstract, although I do not be- 
 lieve it, were one result of his foreign tour. We have, 
 apart from these sonnets, his own statement of the 
 effect that this ' new type ' of beauty produced upon 
 him, accustomed all his life to the quite different charm 
 and rosy freshness of English women, when he speaks 
 of his ' soul tremulous with emotion ' by reason of the 
 loveliness which he beheld. 
 
 Yet think me not thus dazzled by the flow 
 Of golden locks, or damask cheek; more rare 
 The heart-felt beauties of my foreign fair, 
 A mien majestic, with dark brows that show 
 The tranquil lustre of a lofty mind. 
 
 (SONNET V., COWPER'S TRANSLATION.)
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 41 
 
 His song embraces not alone the praises of her per- 
 son, but of her 'gentle spirit' (III.), 'graciously 
 lofty/ (IV.) 
 
 Spirit sweetly displaying itself, 
 
 Of winning deeds never sparing, 
 
 And of those gifts which are the arrows and the bow of 
 
 love 
 In that region where thy high virtue flowers. 
 
 (SONNET III., PATTISON'S TRANSLATION.) 
 
 From what follows in the praise of her voice it has 
 been conjectured that she was the then noted singer, 
 Leonora, whom he heard at Rome, and to whom he 
 wrote three Latin epigrams, Ad Leonoram Romae 
 canentem, the first of which may be freely rendered 
 
 A winged angel from the ethereal ranks 
 In popular belief guards each man's course. 
 What wonder, Leonora, if to thee 
 There fall a greater honour, for thy voice 
 Proclaims God present in thee. Either God 
 Or some bright spirit elect from heavenly choir 
 Sings unseen through thy throat, creative sings, 
 And teaches easily that mortal hearts 
 Accustom may themselves to immortal sounds. 
 But if God be all things, through all diffused, 
 In thee he speaks, all else inhabits mute.* 
 
 Compare with the first two lines of this the following from Samson 
 Agonistes : 
 
 Chorus : Go and the Holy One 
 
 Of Israel 
 
 Send thee the Angel of thy Birth, to stand 
 
 Fast by thy side. 
 
 (U. f 1427-32.)
 
 42 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 He mentions his lady's voice more than once. 
 
 O when those lips in speech so matchless move 
 
 Or frame the song that bids the forest bend, 
 
 Be all aware who fear, alas! to love, 
 
 And from the enchantress every sense defend ; 
 
 Reason can only save, ere yet desire 
 
 With amorous flame the inmost bosom fire. 
 
 (SONNET III., STRUTT'S TRANSLATION.) 
 
 And again ' from her lips ' comes 
 
 Song whose sweet control 
 
 Down from her sphere the labouring moon might bow. 
 (SONNET V., STRUTT'S TRANSLATION.) 
 
 The epigrams to Leonora and the praise of this 
 lady's voice indicate another of Milton's tastes, and 
 one of his strongest, his love of music. He had re- 
 ceived instruction in music and the encouragement of 
 his father, who was a graduate of Oxford, and was 
 devoted to music, being himself a composer whose 
 work was known and recognized as 4 value in his day. 
 Comus had been written for a musical pageant, or 
 mask, at the request of the composer, Harry Lawes, 
 to whom Milton long after dedicated the sonnet, 
 
 Harry, whose tuneful and well measured song 
 
 (SONNET XIV.) 
 
 and in Paradise Lost he repeatedly dwells upon the 
 delights and inspiration of Music : in fact the rhythm
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 43 
 
 and roll of verse in that poem are in a certain way 
 themselves an achievement in music of no mean order. 
 When he was writing Paradise Lost, Milton spent a 
 portion of every day at the organ ; it was his never 
 failing inspiration ; with its notes was his mind in 
 uninterrupted accord. The full tones and ponderous 
 sweep of harmonious sounds in Paradise Lost are just 
 as much a triumph of art, as the choice of words to 
 which that music is the accompaniment, or the majestic 
 imagery that adorns it, or the grand and perfect design 
 to which all its parts and qualities are subservient. 
 
 Besides sitting an hour at the organ every day, 
 Milton often played upon the bass viol, and his wife 
 sang to his accompaniment. Her voice he found 
 sweet ; it is not strange, however, that with his sensi- 
 tive and accurate ear, hers seemed not altogether fault- 
 less. There may be degrees of excellence in melody ; 
 harmony to a correct ear can be only good or bad. 
 
 But to return to the Italian sonnets. There is a 
 passage from Walter Savage Landor in which he says 
 of Milton, ' It may be doubted whether the Creator 
 ever created one altogether so great ; taking into our 
 view at once (as much indeed as can at once be taken 
 into it) his manly virtues, his superhuman genius, his 
 zeal for truth, for true piety, true freedom, his elo- 
 quence in displaying it, his contempt of personal 
 power, his glory and exaltation in his country's.' 
 Whether the estimate is an exaggerated one, we need 
 not here examine; such, in Landor's deliberate opin- 
 ion, this young scholar afterward proved himself, 
 whom we now see writing love sonnets in Italian to 
 an unknown beauty. Bearing in mind the Milton that
 
 44 
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 was to be, had ever woman laid at her feet more pre- 
 cious offering than this from him? 
 
 > 
 
 To you, lady, I offer in deep devotion 
 
 The lowly gift of my heart, a heart which in many a trial 
 
 I have found faithful, intrepid, loyal, discreet, good, 
 
 A source of gracious thought. 
 
 When the great world roars, and thunder bursts around, 
 
 With itself this heart arms itself, as with solid adamant, 
 
 Secure from violence or from envy, 
 
 From all vulgar fears and hopes, 
 
 Though devoted to genius, to high worth, 
 
 To the sounding lyre, and the muse's service. 
 
 (SONNET VII., PATTISON'S TRANSLATION.) 
 
 We cannot but feel glad that when Milton was 
 brought into the presence of splendid Italian beauty 
 he fell deeply in love. It is so pleasant to feel that he 
 was a man as well as a Titan. Every biographical 
 touch that makes him the more human, makes us love 
 him the more ; and consequently heightens our enjoy- 
 ment of what he wrote. I think even that our regard 
 for him increases a little when we learn that he was 
 skilled with the broadsword, and prided himself on 
 being more than a match for a larger man than him- 
 self; it was such a purely personal, harmless vanity. 
 
 Certainly those who have regarded him as unappre- 
 ciative of woman could not be familiar with his English 
 sonnets, four of which are addressed in noble apprecia- 
 tion to her, or still less with the graceful homage of 
 the Italian Sonnets, the natural tribute of an idealist to 
 perfection. 
 
 It is not of slight importance that while being one of
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 45 
 
 the three great epic poets of the world, Milton was also 
 a man, and not at all a dull, dusty scholar, irresponsive 
 to beauty, except of the shadowy sort, fit only to write 
 about. Susceptibility to the charm of woman he had 
 without doubt; Johnson or Macaulay (an evil associa- 
 tion of names when the value of an opinion upon 
 Milton or Dante is at issue) says that he possessed 
 the warmth of temperament of an eastern lord of the 
 harem. That may be, but he had himself in most 
 excellent control. Burns without question had a sim- 
 ilar temperament, but what impresses us above any- 
 thing else in his character is the vigorous human 
 sympathy that he had with every man or woman 
 with whom he came in contact. It is not the first 
 thing, by any means, that strikes us in Milton. He 
 was responsive to grandeur of character, to beauty, to 
 the charms of sex and womanliness, but I do not think 
 his sympathies with mere human kind were very sensi- 
 tive; in fact he was not only slightly, but supremely 
 contemptuous of the crowd. 
 
 The common rout 
 That wandring loose about, 
 Grow up and perish as the summer fly. 
 
 (Samson Agonistes, 674-6. ) 
 
 Or as he says elsewhere, 
 
 A herd confus'd, 
 A miscellaneous rabble, who extol 
 
 Things vulgar. 
 
 (P. R., III., 49.) 
 
 When we give due weight to a quality of Milton 
 which the most competent critics and commentators
 
 46 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 have not failed to observe, the identification of himself 
 with whatever character he is delineating, be it Lucifer 
 or Messiah ; Samson, or Adam, or the ' affable Arch- 
 angel ' ; a quality not injurious to the Epic although 
 it would be fatal to the Drama, and when we observe 
 that it is from the mouth of Christ, tempted by Satan 
 in the Wilderness, that the words of this latter quota- 
 tion proceed, we can realize somewhat the contempt 
 with which he regarded the mere 'breathers' of man- 
 kind, 'heads without name, no more remembered'. 
 
 For what is glory but the blaze of fame, 
 
 The people's praise, if always praise unmixt ? 
 
 And what the people but a herd confus'd, 
 
 A miscellaneous rabble, who extol 
 
 Things vulgar, and well weighed, scarce worth the praise ? 
 
 They praise and they admire they know not what, 
 
 And know not whom, but as one leads the other; 
 
 And what delight to be by such extoll'd, 
 
 To live upon their tongues and be their talk, 
 
 Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise ? 
 
 ********* 
 
 Th' intelligent among them and the wise 
 Are few, and glory scarce of few is raised. 
 
 (P. R., in., 47-590 
 
 While he was Latin Secretary in London, he lived, 
 as he wrote a correspondent, ' very close.' Words- 
 worth was quite fitted to sympathize with this quality, 
 for outside of his shepherds and cottagers, whom he 
 regarded as his discovery and in a way as belonging 
 to him, he troubled himself very little about the out- 
 side world ; what he says of shunning personal gossip
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 47 
 
 in his own case, indicates a similar aloofness of temper- 
 ament ; 
 
 Nor can I not believe but that thereby 
 Great gains are mine ; for thus I live remote 
 From evil speaking ; rancor, never sought, 
 Comes to me not, malignant truth or lie. 
 
 For humanity his love was boundless ; the individual 
 with his personalities and limitations often failed to 
 interest him. 
 
 You remember what Wordsworth says of Milton in 
 his, alas ! too well-known sonnet, 
 
 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. 
 
 This solitariness of character is a quality of Milton 
 not to be disregarded. He was devoted to his friends 
 but not desirous of extending their number, pleased 
 rather with ' contemplation and profound dispute ' than 
 with the refreshment and inspiration derived by many, 
 notably so in the case of Burns, from human contact 
 and sympathy. 
 
 Milton never tired, we are told, of reading what he 
 had written, in which again he was like Wordsworth, 
 and preserved everything from his pen, even school- 
 boy exercises of no value to literature. In this, as 
 Mark Pattison observed, he was the direct opposite of 
 Shelley, who could not bear ever to see a thing after 
 he had once finished it. And there may be a profound
 
 48 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 significance underneath this simple difference. What 
 came from Milton's pen was the product of a mind, 
 before everything else full of health and vigor, and of 
 that mind at its period of greatest health and vigor, 
 and under perfect control. In a lesser degree this 
 is also true of Burns and of Wordsworth. Shelley, 
 while excelling perhaps in throbbing intensity of feel- 
 ing the poetry of any one of them, produces in his 
 reader a sense of unrest and pain. No mind could 
 have been so sensitive to this as his own, and a thing 
 once finished, his greatest delight was to rush into 
 fresh intellectual occupation. 
 
 This ' tumultuous madness ' was not at all a quality 
 of Milton's mind ; what came from it was the product 
 of * sober and sustained elevation of thought.' His 
 'unpremeditated verse,' as he characterizes it, the off- 
 spring of a mind dwelling 
 
 On thoughts, that voluntary move 
 Harmonious numbers, 
 
 was by no means always at his command, but when he 
 was in the vein he wrote with perfect ease and com- 
 posure of spirit; in fact, one quality that is stamped 
 on the entire poetical work of his maturity as fully as 
 any other, is calmness and repose. 
 
 Emerson's famous saying that 'character is higher 
 than intellect,' was never more fully realized than in 
 Milton ; before him we stand in the presence of con- 
 stant and commanding force of character. In reading 
 Milton we feel that the man was greater than the poet. 
 The very period of his life that we are considering,
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 49 
 
 demonstrates that, if it needs demonstration. He de- 
 liberately sacrificed the artistic side of his genius for 
 twenty years to a life of humble usefulness. It was 
 more than craving for artistic cultivation and expression 
 that he sacrificed ; he anticipated with perfect correct- 
 ness the verdict of posterity in regard to his own 
 powers, he had no doubt whatever but that he 
 was equal to the production of an Epic Poem such as 
 England had never seen, and which should serve as a 
 fountain of delight and inspiration for all time, yet 
 well aware of the exalted task which it was his privi- 
 lege to perform, 
 
 (His) heart 
 The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 
 
 and he stayed his hand from the performance of that 
 great work, that he might do exactly what our ances- 
 tors did, when they left their homes and a civilized coun- 
 try for the wilderness and freedom to worship God, 
 that he might, in short, with his whole strength, be a 
 Puritan. 
 
 Only once in a year or two during this time did he 
 write in verse at all, and then some special occasion 
 aroused him to this form of expression. There can be 
 no question but that what he did write freed from the 
 constraints and limitations of prose, is of the utmost 
 value to us, if we wish to judge of his ideals during 
 this period. 
 
 It is impossible to do justice to the Sonnets without 
 
 a familiarity with Paradise Lost ; that is Milton, and 
 
 everything else that he wrote must be considered in 
 
 relation to it, and besides its own value, has an added 
 
 4
 
 50 M/LTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 and peculiar interest attaching to it as the utterance 
 of the same mind that evolved that epic in its full 
 grandeur and symmetry. The Sonnets have this vir- 
 tue, at all events, which belongs to no other of his 
 poetical work, namely that they have been too often 
 overlooked as fragmentary and unimportant. 
 
 Among the English sonnets only one was written 
 before the temporary blight of an unfortunate marriage 
 fell upon his life, and before he was hopelessly involved 
 in pamphlet writing. 
 
 Milton returned from the continent in August, 1639, 
 took rooms in London, and undertook the education of 
 his two nephews, Edward and John Phillips, the sons 
 of his only sister Anne. He had escaped one danger 
 which beset a scholar at that time more than now, the 
 acceptance of a University fellowship. The man who 
 for civil and personal liberty was willing to sacrifice 
 everything in the world, and who, under what appears 
 to have been a mistaken sense of duty, actually did 
 make the greatest sacrifice that poet could be called 
 upon to offer, a sacrifice of nothing less than sustained 
 poetic cultivation and expression during twenty years 
 of his life, the exercise of that 'one talent which is 
 death to hide,' was not the man to be bound by the 
 restraints and limitations of a University fellowship. 
 That would have given us a more learned scholar, but 
 that scholar would never have written Paradise Lost. 
 There can be no question but that at London and in 
 the very whirl of revolutionary excitement, he felt the 
 force of that revolution as he could not have done 
 had he been instead a Cambridge scholar at his ease 
 during all that time.
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 51 
 
 With knowledge of the event, we may regard his 
 acceptance of the Latin Secretaryship as a mistake, so 
 far as the value of his services to the Commonwealth 
 was involved, because we can now see that his pam- 
 phlets, written in a spirit of contention altogether un- 
 worthy of the man, full of invective and of ill feeling, 
 had no influence whatever beyond his own party, and 
 were of trifling service to the elevation of the cause of 
 liberty. Milton, however, was desperately in earnest 
 when he wrote them, and was thinking much more of 
 vigorously attacking his adversary than of anything 
 else whatever ; he was in the midst of fight, with pas- 
 sions aroused, and it is hardly fair for us to judge him 
 in cold blood two centuries and a half later. 
 
 In Italy he had received marked attention as a dis- 
 tinguished stranger and poet, had experienced the 
 hospitality of the Italian Academies, and of learned 
 men in Florence, Rome, and Naples. These were the 
 palmy days of his whole life ; never again was he to be 
 so much petted and admired. He had come home 
 brimful of ambition, and we have in his own handwrit- 
 ing, written within a year or two after his return, and 
 probably begun immediately after that event, a long 
 list of possible subjects for an epic poem, mask, or 
 drama, in which precedence was given to the subject 
 of Paradise Lost, a poem destined, however, not to be 
 written for twenty years, and mentioned here only to 
 show the bent of his mind at this time. After he had 
 decided upon the epic form, (in 1642), we have his 
 own statement that he did not consider himself as 
 fitted yet, or as sufficiently experienced and mature, for 
 its production.
 
 52 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 It will be remembered that the tragedy of the Revo- 
 lution was now in full progress. The royal army was 
 defeated by the Scotch Presbyterians in August, 1640, 
 and the Long Parliament met in November of that 
 year. 
 
 No man in England was in fuller sympathy with the 
 Puritan cause than Milton, or more alive to the abuses 
 in the church than he. In Lycidas, written three years 
 before, he had characterized the clergy in that scathing 
 lament of Peter, 
 
 How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain 
 
 ending in the prophetic lines, 
 
 But that two-handed engine at the door, 
 Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. 
 
 So far as in him lay, Milton assisted at that retribu- 
 tion. 
 
 In 1641 he published hisfirst pamphlet, (I.), Of Refor- 
 mation touching Church Discipline in England, and 
 the Causes that hitherto have hindered it, being in two 
 books and attacking the Bishops and the Established 
 Church. After this followed in quick succession, (II.), 
 Of Prelaticall Episcopacy, being a reply to the most 
 learned man in the English Church, Archbishop Usher, 
 who had written a pamphlet called 'The Apostolical 
 Institution of Episcopacy/ and, (III.), The Reason of 
 Church Government urged against Prelacy. Then 
 came, in 1642, (IV.), Animadversions upon the Remon- 
 strant's Defence against Smectymnuus, which was an
 
 MILTON 1 S SONNETS. 53 
 
 attack upon Bishop Hall, and to say the least a heated 
 and undignified attack. One more pamphlet he wrote 
 in this debate, (V.), The Apology for Smectymnuus. 
 
 These are dreary reading to-day, although they con- 
 tain passages of noble English, and the Reason of 
 Church Government a distinct promise of some great 
 work yet to be done. 
 
 Milton was in the heat of the fight, and when he 
 wrote the sonnet upon the Intended Assault on the 
 City, which is the next which we have to consider, and 
 had no cause to accuse himself of being a Laodocean, 
 of living in scholarly ease and security, amusing him- 
 self with the composition of verses, while others were 
 actually bearing arms in defence of liberty. He was 
 doing the best that in him lay, though with infinite 
 temerity when he attacked a man of Usher's erudition in 
 church literature; 'Being willing,' he says, 'to help the 
 Puritans who were inferior to the Prelates in learning,' 
 although ' not disposed to this manner of writing, 
 wherein knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the 
 genial powers of nature to another task, I have the 
 use, as I may account it, but of my left hand.' 
 
 Such, then, were the circumstances of his life : he was 
 living in London, teaching his nephews, and doing his 
 best to help the cause of reformation with his pen, when 
 the royal army advanced upon the city, and was met 
 almost in its suburbs, on the 13 Nov., 1642, by the 
 parliamentary forces under Essex. 
 
 Others have dwelt upon their chosen theme, Milton 
 the Puritan, Milton the Republican, Milton the In- 
 spired Poet and Seer; it may be permitted me to ob- 
 serve that if any single incident in his life revealed
 
 54 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 Milton the Scholar, we see it here. It was the Schol- 
 ar's instinct that made him in a time of excitement and 
 danger, while others were bearing arms or were run- 
 ning about the streets for news, quietly to sit down, 
 and seeking relief from the anxieties of the hour, to 
 express himself with calmness and dignity in verse. 
 
 With the two armies confronting one another, forty 
 thousand men in arms, within a few miles of his door, 
 it took splendid composure of mind quietly to write 
 these lines, his first expression in English verse since 
 Lycidas was written, five years before. 
 
 Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms, 
 
 Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize, 
 
 If deed of honour did thee ever please, 
 
 Guard them, and him within protect from harms. 
 
 He can requite thee, for he knows the charms 
 
 That call fame on such gentle acts as these, 
 
 And he can spread thy name o'er land and seas 
 
 Whatever clime the sun's bright circle warms. 
 
 Lift not thy spear against the Muse's bower; 
 
 The great Emathian conquerer bid spare 
 
 The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower 
 
 Went to the ground ; and the repeated air 
 
 Of sad Electra's poet had the power 
 
 To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare. 
 
 How crisp, and strong, and resonant the verses roll ! 
 
 I will not enter into the simple elucidation of the schol- 
 arly references of the sestet ; what I wish to emphasize 
 is that Milton's having written the sonnet at all is a sign 
 of intellectual serenity superior to anything which the 
 sonnet itself contains, although that is very fine. Ob-
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 55 
 
 serve, however, the perfectly matter of course way in 
 which this young scholar, 
 
 Young in years, but in sage counsel old, 
 
 ranks himself without vainglory, as without apology, 
 with Pindar and with Euripides. 
 
 From the time of his marriage until 1658, the year in 
 which the last sonnet was written, and when we know 
 he was writing continuously upon Paradise Lost, Mil- 
 ton wrote about twenty pamphlets in English and 
 Latin, half of them on church matters and several at 
 the order of the Council, whose servant he became in 
 1649. Charles I. was beheaded in January of that 
 year, and on 1 5 March, Milton took the oath of office 
 as Latin Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Af- 
 fairs, which was composed of six members of the 
 Council of State. The position was not an important 
 one. There was an English Secretary, whose services 
 were deemed of twice the value of Milton's, and he 
 was not intrusted with the original composition of dis- 
 patches except in a few instances. The most impor- 
 tant thing that he did in this capacity was to write in 
 Latin, among other pamphlets in the same tongue, his 
 Defence of the English People, first and second, yet 
 these have slight value for us to-day, and no one 
 thinks of reading them. 
 
 Milton accepted the position from a mistaken sense 
 of duty, but it is not impossible that together with the 
 sense of duty, and acting as an unconscious motive, he 
 felt a temptation, peculiarly hard for a scholar to resist, 
 for one who had seen but little of the world of affairs,
 
 56 M/LTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 and for a man of his courageous temperament, that 
 of an active career and of contact and acquaintance 
 with the leaders of Parliament and the State. 
 
 In the Paradise Regained one of the temptations 
 offered by Satan is a knowledge of the world and of 
 courts, 
 
 Best school of best experience. 
 
 With his imagination fired by the success of the Par- 
 liamentary cause, could he help feeling the full entice- 
 ment of the opportunity ? He no doubt would desire 
 at the end of his life to be able to say as Chaucer had 
 said, looking back over his own, two centuries and 
 more before that time, 
 
 It doth mine herte boote 
 
 That I have had my world as in my time. 
 
 Who can say that he chose not wisely ? It may have 
 taken participation in the intensest life of his time to 
 fire his genius to the portrayal of the arch-rebel, Luci- 
 fer; just as blindness itself, although profound misfor- 
 tune to the man, was probably an inspiration and gave 
 pathetic sympathy with the subject when he wrote 
 Samson Agonistes ; but it is hard for us to say which 
 seems the greater apparent misfortune, that he should 
 be blind at forty-three, or that he should be forced to 
 forego for twenty years, with the risk of never doing 
 it, the accomplishment of that great work in literature 
 which he knew himself fitted by genius to construct, 
 and to the performance of which he felt his life to be 
 dedicated.
 
 AffLTON'S SONNETS. 57 
 
 Phillips tells us in his life of his uncle that one of 
 Milton's friends at this time was the wife of a Captain 
 Hobson, the Lady Margaret Ley (or Leigh), daugh- 
 ter of the first Earl of Marlborough, who had been 
 Lord High Treasurer, and President of the Council 
 under James and Charles I., and who had been an 
 active supporter of the Parliamentary cause. Milton 
 addressed a sonnet to her : 
 
 Daughter to that good Earl, once President 
 Of England's council and her treasury. 
 
 Then follows praise of her father, the sestet conclud- 
 ing 
 
 Though later born than to have known the days, 
 Wherein your father flourished, yet by you, 
 Madam, methinks I see him living yet ; 
 So well your words his noble virtues praise, 
 That all both judge you to relate them true, 
 And to possess them, honoured Margaret. 
 
 There is a quiet dignity about this sonnet that is charm- 
 ing. Structurally, it is correct in one detail of which 
 the most of Milton's sonnets are regardless, namely, 
 in the observance of the pause between the octave and 
 sestet. It may be said that the last line comes as near 
 the epigrammatic ending without actually erring, as 
 may with safety be approached. 
 
 Shakspere's not unusual practice was to conclude 
 with an epigram, the form which he employed, of four 
 quatrains and a couplet favouring this practice. But 
 as has been said before, the English Sonnet was in its
 
 5 8 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 infancy in his day. Countless experiments have taught 
 us since that what should be aimed at in a sonnet is the 
 expression of a single thought or emotion, the forma- 
 tion of a compact, well-rounded, organic whole, and 
 not a brilliant finish which may detract at all from the 
 force and relative importance of any preceding part. 
 
 The three sonnets addressed to Fairfax, Cromwell, 
 and Vane, are of peculiar- interest. That On the Lord 
 General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester, 
 
 Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings, 
 
 is an expression of delight and of congratulation at the 
 success of the Independent army, rather than a per- 
 sonal address to the general, or eulogy of the man ; 
 the same may be said of the sonnet addressed to 
 Cromwell. It is the occasion that Milton has in mind 
 rather than the person, and the closing verses show 
 that, Milton -like, he was not at all disposed to rest sat- 
 isfied with victory over the Royalists, while Parliament 
 acted from any motives other than the most patriotic 
 and the most pure. 
 
 O yet a nobler task awaits thy hand 
 
 (For what can war but endless war still breed ?) 
 
 Till truth and right from violence be freed, 
 
 And public faith cleared from the shameful brand 
 
 Of public fraud. In vain doth valour bleed, 
 
 While avarice and rapine share the land. 
 
 The Siege of Colchester was in July and August, 
 1648 ; Charles was beheaded in the following January.
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 59 
 
 At this time Milton was living quietly in London, per- 
 haps teaching his nephews, his time fully occupied ; at 
 all events we know that he was busy in the compila- 
 tion of a Latin Dictionary, in the writing of a History 
 of England from the most remote times, in the forma- 
 tion of a Digest of Christian Doctrine from the Bible, 
 and in the metrical translation of nine Psalms from the 
 Hebrew. 
 
 His next sonnet, addressed to Cromwell, was not 
 written for four years. This was after he had become 
 Latin Secretary, and when he had been totally blind 
 for little more than a month, on account of which he 
 was not for the time being in attendance at the Coun- 
 cil meetings. He took this way of urging Cromwell, 
 who was a member of the Committee before whom 
 the matter came, to oppose a ministry supported by 
 tithes, to the full extent of his influence and power; 
 Cromwell, however, did not regard the matter in the 
 same light as did Milton. 
 
 During the time which had elapsed since the sonnet 
 to Fairfax, he had written the then important pamphlet 
 on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which was 
 of influence in fixing the choice of the Council upon 
 him for Latin Secretary ; after the appointment he had 
 been fully occupied with the new duties of his office 
 and in writing pamphlets for the Council. 
 
 One naturally turns to the sonnet on Cromwell for 
 Milton's estimate of the other's greatness ; for that we 
 must look elsewhere. Although in matters of scholar- 
 ship Cromwell was a barbarian, and there could be no 
 sympathy between him and Milton in such matters, yet 
 in what concerned religion and the Commonwealth of
 
 60 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 England, Milton was in close sympathy with him. 
 There is no evidence to show, however, that the two 
 men were ever friends or even acquaintances. Offi- 
 cially, Milton held a humble position under the Com- 
 monwealth ; Hume's quotation from Whitlocke, Lord 
 Keeper of the Seals, is familiar, in which he speaks 
 of ' one Milton, as he calls him, a blind man, who was 
 employed in translating a treaty with Sweden into 
 Latin;'* Milton was yet unknown. This sonnet to 
 Cromwell, as the title in the original manuscript copy 
 indicates, was written rather invoking aid than in a 
 spirit of adulation. Its title reads To the Lord 
 General Cromwell, May 1652, on the Proposals of Cer- 
 tain Ministers at the Committee for Propagation of the 
 Gospel. Its purpose was to defeat the Presbyterians 
 who were desirous of providing a maintenance by 
 tithes for their church. Milton had this, as well as 
 other bonds, in common with Fox to the pure spir- 
 ituality of whose nature his own lofty and ideal 
 poetic instincts, blended with sound and unswerving 
 character, bore close resemblance that he regarded 
 with horror a ministry supported by tithes, deeming 
 spiritual matters separate from, and altogether above 
 matters of state. 
 
 9 
 
 Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud 
 
 Not of war only, but detractions rude, 
 
 Guided by faith and matchless fortitude, 
 
 To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed, 
 
 And on the neck of crowned fortune proud 
 
 Hast reared God's trophies, and his work pursued, 
 
 While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued, 
 
 * Hume, ch. LXIII.
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 6 1 
 
 And Dunbar field, resound thy praises loud, 
 
 And Worcester's laureate wreath; yet much remains 
 
 To conquer still ; peace hath her victories 
 
 No less renowned than war ; new foes arise 
 
 Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains. 
 
 Help us to save free conscience from the paw 
 
 Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw. * 
 
 It is interesting to read, in connection with the sonnet 
 to Cromwell, Milton's panegyric of him in the Defensio 
 Secunda, published two years later. Fortunately we 
 have a translation full of dignity by a scholar, appre- 
 ciative of elegant Latin, if not appreciative and approv- 
 ing of Milton, by Dr. Johnson himself. 'A translation,' 
 he tells us, ' may show its servility ; but its elegance 
 is less attainable.' * * * Caesar, when he assumed 
 the perpetual dictatorship, had not more servile or more 
 elegant flattery.' 
 
 Compare with the ending of this sonnet the lines from Lycidas^ 
 
 The hungry sheep look up and are not fed, 
 But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 
 Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread: 
 Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 
 Daily devours apace, and nothing said. 
 
 (LI., 125-129.) 
 
 and the following from Paradise Lost: 
 
 Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves, 
 
 Who all the sacred mysteries of Heaven 
 
 To their own vile advantages shall turn 
 
 Of lucre and ambition, and the truth 
 
 With superstitions and traditions taint. 
 
 (LI., 508-512.) 
 A
 
 62 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 '"We were left," says Milton, "to ourselves; the 
 whole national interest fell into your hands, and subsists 
 only in your abilities. To your virtue, overpowering 
 and resistless, every man gives way, except some who, 
 without equal qualifications, aspire to equal honours, 
 who envy the distinctions of merit greater than their 
 own, or who have yet to learn, that in the coalition 
 of human society nothing is more pleasing to God, or 
 more agreeable to reason, than that the highest mind 
 should have the sovereign power. Such, sir, are you 
 by general confession ; such are the things achieved 
 by you, the greatest and most glorious of our country- 
 men, the director of our public councils, the leader of 
 unconquered armies, the father of your country; for by 
 that title does every good man hail you with sincere 
 and voluntary praise."' 
 
 The Sonnet to Vane forms the fourth of those, which 
 by reason of their republican tone could not be pub- 
 lished after the Restoration with Milton's other poems, 
 the year before his death, 1673, and were not in fact 
 published in the form in which they were written until a 
 century after their composition, 1 752. Milton's nephew, 
 Phillips, issued them in a safe but garbled edition in 
 1694. 
 
 Sir Henry Vane, 
 
 Vane, young in years, but in sage councils old, 
 
 to whom this was addressed was at the time a member 
 of the Council of State. 
 
 It seems strange to speak of one of Milton's sonnets 
 as addressed to an American, yet we are not overstep-
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 63 
 
 ping the truth in saying that Vane had been an Amer- 
 ican if he was not at this time. He came here with the 
 younger Winthrop on his second visit in 1635, and it 
 was alone owing to an unfortunate disagreement on a 
 doctrinal point of religion that he did not remain. 
 
 Winthrop says '(He) forsook the honours and pref- 
 erments of the court, to enjoy the ordinances of Christ 
 in their purity here.' 
 
 His father, at the time the son came here, was a 
 Privy Councillor and one of the Secretaries of State, 
 altogether one of the two or three most important 
 men in England at that time. Before the younger 
 Vane, then twenty- three years of age, had been here 
 nine months, the General Court elected him Governor 
 of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as she called 
 herself, already aspiring to be a Republic. Unfortu- 
 nately, at a very critical period in the History of the 
 Massachusetts Colony, when the permanence of her 
 charter was threatened by Charles, who had granted it, 
 on which charter were based all her hopes of Independ- 
 ence, Vane entangled himself in the controversy then 
 active on Salvation by faith or works, and championed 
 the cause of the famous Mrs. Ann Hutchinson. He con- 
 trived to stir up very heated opposition on this account, 
 and left the colony in disgust after his failure to be 
 reelected and after he had been here less than two 
 years. He became Minister for Foreign Affairs under 
 Cromwell, and ten years after this sonnet was written 
 was beheaded by Charles II., (1662). 
 
 Lord Clarendon's estimate of Vane is that he was a 
 fanatic ; like others of the time, he was an enthusiast 
 in religion. What is of chief interest to us, is that
 
 64 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 to him Milton awarded praise which he gave to no 
 other man in his Sonnets. 
 
 Vane, young in years, but in sage council old, 
 Than whom a better Senator ne'er held 
 The helm of Rome, when gowns not arms repelled 
 The fierce Epirot and the African bold. 
 * * * 
 
 On thy firm hand religion leans 
 In peace, and reckons thee her eldest son. 
 
 When Milton wrote his famous Sonnet On the Late 
 Massacre in Piedmont, it is not impossible that his 
 mind was dwelling again on the theme of Paradise 
 Lost. Three years later his nephew tells us that he 
 was continuously at work upon it ; a fragment of ten 
 lines in the fourth book had been written immediately 
 after his return from Italy in 1640, as the opening 
 lines of his then contemplated tragedy treating of the 
 same theme. 
 
 I do not mean to say that the same feeling pervades 
 this sonnet which is the life and atmosphere of Para- 
 dise Lost. That is primarily and above all else a work 
 of the imagination, and possesses the richness and 
 grandeur which a World's Epic should possess ; the 
 sonnet is the expression of powerful feeling, clothed in 
 simple, homely words. What I do mean to say is that 
 this sonnet is the product of Milton's genius at the very 
 height of its powers, and is in every way worthy of the 
 mind that so soon was to evolve in its intricate sim- 
 plicity, in its grand and unconfused proportions, the 
 poem of Paradise Lost.
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 65 
 
 The event which roused Milton to this 'trumpet 
 blast ' of wrath, to the solemn invoking of God's anger 
 against the offenders, was the massacre of three hun- 
 dred innocent men, women, and children of the people 
 known as Vaudois, or Waldenses, living well up in the 
 Alpine Valleys of Piedmont in Italy. The Vaudois 
 were poor peasants, a few thousand in number, who 
 from time immemorial had, in spite of persecution, 
 refused to comply with the demands of the Romish 
 church. They were ' Protestants ' long before the 
 Reformation, and as such were peculiarly dear to all 
 Protestant countries when the atrocious crime of 
 which they were now the victims was committed. This 
 was the people 
 
 Who kept (God's) truth so pure of old, 
 
 When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones. 
 
 Their valleys were a part of the possessions of the 
 Duke of Savoy, and this humble folk had been some- 
 what spared for a few generations from great perse- 
 cution. The present Duke, on the attainment of his 
 majority, determined to bring them into the church. 
 Catholic Friars were sent among them, one of whom 
 was killed ; thereupon the edict went forth from the 
 Court of Turin that the entire population of nine of 
 their communes should within three days, unless they 
 pledged themselves to enter the Romish church within 
 twenty days thereafter, remove to five of their com- 
 munes situated higher up in the Alps. Remonstrance 
 to the Court was in vain, and towards the end of April, 
 still a time of snow in the Alps, the threat was put in 
 5
 
 66 M/LTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 execution. A body of troops sufficient for the purpose 
 was sent among them, and for eight days everything 
 that hatred and resistance could inspire, or brutal cru- 
 elty and lust suggest, was wreaked on these poor vil- 
 lagers. Their only safety was in flight higher up the 
 mountains, where without sufficient shelter or suste- 
 nance, great hardship was suffered. A circular letter 
 was addressed to the Protestant Powers of Europe, and 
 the news of the massacre reached England a month 
 later. None felt the calamity more than Cromwell, 
 who said that it came as ' near his heart as if his own 
 nearest and dearest had been concerned.' 
 
 A day of humiliation was appointed, and a collection 
 taken for their relief, amounting to more than six hun- 
 dred thousand dollars of our money to-day, thirty-five 
 thousand of which Cromwell gave from his own purse. 
 The matter became that of chief importance in the 
 Council, and Milton drew up no less than eleven letters 
 in Latin to the Duke of Savoy, the King of France, 
 the Swiss Cantons, to the King of Sweden, and others, 
 demanding redress and invoking aid. 
 
 There was, as I have said, an English Secretary to 
 the Council of State, whose duty it was to draw up 
 foreign dispatches which the Latin Secretary rendered 
 into Latin. But the dispatches in this case, one of the 
 few instances where it so happened, were drawn up by 
 the Latin Secretary himself, so his mind was full of the 
 subject, and that Secretary being Milton, he naturally 
 sought expression for profound feeling in verse. The 
 result was that he then wrote what critics best qualified 
 to judge have pronounced the most magnificent sonnet 
 in the English language. Others have written sonnets
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 67 
 
 full of fine poetic feeling ; among the sonnets of Shaks- 
 pere, Keats, Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning, and Rosetti, 
 may be found those just as full of intense emotion of a 
 different sort, and possessing charms of delicacy which 
 this makes no attempt to attain ; but this before every 
 sonnet in the Language takes precedence for force and 
 virility. 
 
 Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
 Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold ; 
 Even them, who kept thy truth so pure of old, 
 When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones, 
 Forget not : in thy book record their groans, 
 Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold 
 Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled 
 Mother with infant down the rocks ; their moans 
 The vales redoubled to the hills and they 
 To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow 
 O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway 
 The triple tyrant ; that from these may grow 
 A hundred-fold, who, having learnt thy way, 
 Early may fly the Babylonian woe. 
 
 The excellence of this sonnet lies in something else 
 than in poetical idea or in grandeur of diction. If 
 Wordsworth's definition of poetry be a correct one, 
 this sonnet exactly fulfils its requirements, it is a 
 'spontaneous outburst of powerful emotion.' To re- 
 peat his words in regard to the Sonnet in general, in 
 writing which he must have had this one in mind, 
 
 In ( Milton's) hand 
 
 The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew 
 Soul-animating strains alas, too few!
 
 68 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 Whether the sonorous ring of its verse is best ex- 
 pressed in likening it to the trumpet blast, or whether 
 it approach not nearer to the grand organ roll, whose 
 music is heard, sometimes in faint undertone, again 
 in overpowering volume, surging through the mighty 
 verse of Paradise Lost, of this there can be no ques- 
 tion, that in its limited compass echo ' the solemn and 
 divine harmonies of music.' 
 
 The sonnets to Cromwell, Vane, and on the Massa- 
 cre in Piedmont were all written after Milton's blind- 
 ness ; that on his Blindness in the same year as the 
 last of these. It is the meditation of a wise man 
 schooling himself to adversity. Not a note of repining 
 in the presence of almost overwhelming misfortune do 
 we hear, such as the moan echoing in the Agonistes, 
 
 O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, 
 Irrevocably dark, total Eclipse 
 Without all hope of day ! 
 
 only the lament here of a strong man that his voice of 
 song has not been raised in the service of God, since 
 as Milton believed God is best served by the faithful 
 exercise of those talents which he has given, to one 
 five, to another two, to another one ; to every man ac- 
 cording to his several ability. 
 
 When I consider how my light is spent, 
 Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, 
 And that one talent which is death to hide 
 Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent 
 To serve therewith my Maker, and present
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 69 
 
 My true account, lest He returning chide, 
 ' Doth God exact day-labour, light denied ? ' 
 I fondly ask. But patience to prevent 
 That murmur, soon replies, ' God doth not need 
 ' Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best 
 ' Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state 
 ' Is kingly ; thousands at his bidding speed, 
 ' And post o'er land and ocean without rest ; 
 ' They also serve who only stand and wait.' 
 
 All of Milton's powers were unconsciously gather- 
 ing and solidifying and ordering themselves for the 
 supreme effort of Paradise Lost. 
 
 They also serve who only stand and wait, 
 
 says the man whose 'unpremeditated verse,' 
 
 Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence 
 
 Flowed from (his) lips, in Prose or Numerous Verse, 
 
 More tuneable than needed Lute or Harp 
 
 To add more sweetness. 
 
 (P. L.,V. 149-152.) 
 
 whose verse in two or three years was to take the form 
 of Paradise Lost ; whose hand was to strike with ease 
 and with firmness those heroic chords, as only two, or 
 three, or four men, in the whole history of the world, 
 before his time and since have struck, in sympathy with 
 which every man that reads, feels himself dignified, and 
 ennobled, and taught infinite lessons of courage and of 
 proud humility. 
 
 Similar to the sonnet which we have been consider-
 
 70 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 ing, and also on the theme of his blindness, is the 
 second of those addressed to Cyriac Skinner, who was 
 of the little band of young men one of whom daily 
 read and walked with him. 
 
 Cyriac, this three years' day these eyes, though clear, 
 
 To outward view, of blemish or of spot, 
 
 Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot ; 
 
 Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear 
 
 Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year, 
 
 Or man, or woman. 
 
 Like enough to be a continuation are the lines of the 
 third book of Paradise Lost. 
 
 Thus with the year 
 Seasons return, but not to me returns 
 Day, or the sweet approach of Even or Morn, 
 Or sight of vernal bloom or Summer's Rose, 
 Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. 
 
 The Sonnet continues Milton-like, in nothing that 
 he wrote do we see the fibre of his character more 
 plainly shown than here : 
 
 Yet I argue not 
 
 Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot 
 Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer 
 Right onward. 
 
 The Restoration of Charles II. to the English throne 
 was to take place in less than five years. That
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 7! 
 
 Restoration was to Milton the shattering of his dearest 
 hopes. The work for which in his youth he had so 
 carefully trained himself, unperformed, himself in hope- 
 less blindness, in poverty, in disgrace, and in old age, 
 his second wife dead, after fifteen months of happy 
 married life, the more pleasing in contrast with his 
 first marriage, and obliged to hide, such a life might to 
 another have seemed a wretched failure. Yet the most 
 sympathetic admirer of Milton and the most unreserved 
 Republican may be pardoned if he rejoice in the ser- 
 vice which Charles II. unwittingly rendered to the 
 cause of civilization, by setting free the man John Mil- 
 ton from unprofitable tasks, to write Paradise Lost> 
 even although the causes which produced that libera- 
 tion were apparently misfortunes to the man, and post- 
 poned for a while Democracy in England. 
 
 The other sonnet addressed to Cyriac Skinner and 
 the one to Lawrence we could ill spare in any treat- 
 ment, however special, of his verse written during this 
 period, which should present us with a well-rounded 
 character, or give us a correct idea of the man. 
 
 The touches of humour in Paradise Lost are forbid- 
 ding. More than once do the austerities of the He- 
 brew Jehovah yield place to the equally repellant and 
 ungodlike derision of a Jove, looking at man's failure to 
 laugh at it as where Raphael in the Eighth Book 
 tells Adam that man's solution of the celestial motions 
 will excite God's mirth ; or where in the last book, the 
 confusion of tongues provoked God to merriment ; or 
 where in the Fifth Book he holds in contempt the re- 
 volt of Lucifer and the Sons of Morn, although they 
 were his created Angels and a third part of the hosts
 
 72 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 of Heaven. Only severe Puritanism and Calvinistic 
 theology could so harden a poet as to make him imag- 
 ine the pleasure of the Creator contemplating the in- 
 firmities of his creature. 
 
 But in these sonnets which we now approach, we 
 see the amiable side of Milton, as nowhere else more 
 fully. 
 
 Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son, 
 
 Now that the fields are dark, and ways are mire, 
 
 Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire 
 
 Help waste a sullen day, what may be won 
 
 From the hard season gaining ? Time will run 
 
 On smoother, till Favonius reinspire 
 
 The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire 
 
 The lily and the rose that neither sowed nor spun. 
 
 What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice, 
 
 Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise 
 
 To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice 
 
 Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air ? 
 
 He who of these delights can judge, and spare 
 
 To interpose them oft, is not unwise. 
 
 These last two lines contain one of the most delight- 
 ful ambiguities to be found in literature ; one capable 
 of quite opposite meanings. Milton does not mean 
 that the man is wise who will spare time to interpose 
 these good things frequently ; what he wished to en- 
 force was a sparing indulgence in repasts however 
 1 neat ' with wine ; as for the beneficial services of music, 
 he believed in them without reserve, as elevating, and 
 full of strength and repose. Compare the ending of 
 this sonnet, as presenting a moral lesson unexpectedly
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 73 
 
 following the graceful musings of the poet, with that of 
 one of the Italian love sonnets. 
 
 Oh, were my sluggish heart and hard bosom, 
 As good a soil to him who plants from Heaven. 
 
 (IV., PATTISON'S TRANSLATION.) 
 
 In a similar vein to this and equally charming, com- 
 ing from the blind scholar and poet to his young friend, 
 is the first of the two to Cyriac Skinner. 
 
 To-day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench 
 In mirth that, after, no repenting draws ; 
 Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause, 
 And what the Swede intends, and what the French. 
 To measure life learn thou betimes, and know 
 Towards solid good what leads the nearest way ; 
 For other things mild Heaven a time ordains, 
 And disapproves that care, though wise in show, 
 That with superfluous burden loads the day, 
 And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains. 
 
 Thus our study of Milton's sonnets has come to his 
 last one, and I hope the time so spent has not been 
 tedious. 
 
 Before we consider his last touching utterance in this 
 form, it may be well to regard for a moment the Son- 
 nets as a whole, and see, if we may, wherein it has 
 been worth our while to study them for an hour. 
 
 Milton's Sonnets reflect the period of his life in which 
 they were written. They are the simple, forcible utter- 
 ance of a great poet, who has sacrificed his passion for 
 Poetry to a stronger passion for Duty. The Sonnets,
 
 74 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 in many ways, show the limitations of the poet's life. 
 They are not written in an imaginative vein ; while he 
 was endowed with the most powerfully organic imagi- 
 nation in English verse, his sonnets are of Doric sever- 
 ity. It is remarkable that the fault of ornateness, 
 which this form of verse had derived in a perfectly 
 legitimate manner from its Italian model, but which 
 was not suited to the genius of our language, should 
 have been corrected by the one English poet with 
 the most splendid and exuberant imaginative powers. 
 His is the credit of having penetrated to the life and 
 nature of the Sonnet and recognized its exact scope 
 and place in our language. For twenty years he chose 
 no other form for expression in verse, and his success 
 was such in this as to warrant Wordsworth's praise, in 
 calling them ' soul animating strains.' 
 
 It would not be surprising if poetical work whose 
 merit so experienced a critic as Dr. Johnson failed al- 
 together to detect, and which others since have pro- 
 nounced not very remarkable, should fail to make a 
 telling impression on cursory acquaintance ; but when 
 we have the testimony of Wordsworth, calling them 
 ' soul animating strains,' k behooves us before hastily 
 pronouncing judgment on their worth, to penetrate to 
 the secret of their power if we are able to do so. 
 
 It is well known that the same powers that produced 
 it, are required to form a judgment of any artistic crea- 
 tion, the same, differing only in degree, the closer 
 the approach to equal powers, the keener the delight 
 to be derived in appreciation. 
 
 No one questions the force and truth of his state- 
 ment when a preacher tells us that only those whose
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 75 
 
 life approaches somewhat in spirituality to that of 
 Christ can realize and appreciate the sublimity and 
 divineness of his character; and that those whose 
 lives most nearly approach to the divine perfection of 
 their master, following his bidding to be perfect even 
 as God is perfect, will most fully appreciate the unat- 
 tainable perfection of their exemplar. 
 
 In an exactly similar manner, to compare small 
 things with great, or great things with those far 
 greater, only those whose intellectual powers and 
 cultivation most nearly approach those of the poet 
 can adequately judge of his excellence. 
 
 There is in the Sonnets of Milton a power of art 
 displayed which it took the kindred art of Wordsworth 
 fully to detect and appreciate. ' My admiration of 
 some of the Sonnets of Milton first tempted me to 
 write in that form,' he tells us. (Advertisement to Col- 
 lected Sonnets.) ' In the cottage of Town-end, one 
 afternoon in 1801, my sister read to me the Sonnets of 
 Milton. I had long been well acquainted with them, 
 but I was particularly struck on that occasion with the 
 dignified simplicity and majestic harmony that runs 
 through most of them in character so totally dif- 
 ferent from the Italian, and still more so from Shaks- 
 pere's fine Sonnets. I took fire, if I may be allowed 
 to say so, and produced three Sonnets the same after- 
 noon, the first I ever wrote, except an irregular one at 
 school.' (Notes by the author to the complete edition 
 of Wordsworth's Poems.) 
 
 Wordsworth's Sonnets were written by a poet at his 
 leisure and carefully protected from distraction. 
 
 I think we shall find the key to the working out and
 
 76 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 to the fertility of Wordsworth's genius in one of his 
 Sonnets and in a letter, the two written more than a 
 quarter of a Century apart; the letter long before 
 success crowned him, the sonnet after the vast bulk of 
 his poetry on which his fame depends was written. 
 
 Most sweet it is with unuplifteo! eyes 
 
 To pace the ground, if path there be or none, 
 
 While a fair region round the traveller lies 
 
 Which he forbears again to look upon ; 
 
 Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene, 
 
 The work of fancy, or some happy tone 
 
 Of meditation, slipping in between 
 
 The beauty coming and the beauty gone. 
 
 If Tlwught and Love desert us, from that day 
 
 Let us break off all commerce with the Muse. 
 
 With Thought and Love companions of our way, 
 
 Whate'er the senses take or may refuse, 
 
 The mind's internal heaven shall shed her dews 
 
 Of inspiration in the humblest lay. 
 
 (Composed in 1833.) 
 
 Wordsworth had meditated of the deepest issues of 
 life, and had thrown his whole soul into what he had 
 said. People would not, at first, accept such senti- 
 ment, their interests being engrossed in the struggle 
 for preferment, and in all sorts of ambitions : 
 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. 
 
 What have the things which I have written, he writes 
 his correspondent, ' to do ( to say it all at once ) with a
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 77 
 
 life without love? In such a life there can be no 
 thought; for we have no thought (save thoughts of 
 pain), but as far as we have love and admiration.' 
 (Letter to Lady Beaumont, 1807.) 
 
 In Love and Thought was his life rounded ; one was 
 possible to him only as the other was lavished upon 
 him, and those who are familiar with his life know that 
 he was surrounded, during the twenty years of his 
 inspired poetic utterance, with all the care which the 
 affection of two most remarkably bright and devoted 
 women, his wife and his sister, could suggest. Forced 
 to live with rigid economy, yet with everything done 
 for him that love could prompt, removed from the dis- 
 tractions of society and the world, nourishing a life of 
 sedate reflection and meditative calm and continence, 
 it is no wonder that his mind attained that healthful- 
 ness, whose product is the splendid sanity of his verse, 
 the joy and refreshment and health of which could 
 make conquest even of the scientifically derived dis- 
 satisfaction and overwhelming sense of futility and 
 dejection which beset John Stuart Mill at one time, 
 as he tells us in his Autobiography, and which much 
 oftener prevails in the moods of less elaborately and 
 mechanically sustained faculties. 
 
 Solitude and fostering care were absolutely neces- 
 sary to the performance of what he did; Milton 
 produced the work that we are considering amid the 
 bustle and distractions of public office, and occupied 
 with fighting the wordy battles of his party. It is no 
 wonder that such work partakes of limitations, yet 
 1 Milton's (Sonnets) stand supreme in stateliness, (as) 
 Wordsworth's in depth and delicacy,' says Francis Tur-
 
 78 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 ner Palgrave, now professor of poetry at Oxford, and a 
 critic whose opinion is of the very highest value. What 
 qualities unite in them to produce their stateliness ? 
 
 We should deceive ourselves if we selected the Son- 
 nets as part of Milton's most imaginative poetry, as of 
 the same order of poetry as Lycidas, the Penseroso, or 
 Paradise Lost; these would approach, or fulfil, the 
 function of Poetry as Wordsworth has defined it, as 
 being the end toward which he himself aspired as a 
 poet ; ' To console the afflicted ; to add sunshine to 
 daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the 
 young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, 
 and to feel.' (Letter to Lady Beaumont.) 
 
 It is not for clairvoyant sight, a strength of vision 
 that penetrates to the inmost life of things, and which 
 we find in Wordsworth, that these sonnets are remark- 
 able ; nor does their value consist in profound thought. 
 They are not to be compared with Shakspere's in this 
 regard, which are packed full of meaning, a more 
 recondite significance often underlying that of the sur- 
 face. The best of these sonnets reveal strength of 
 feeling; therein lies their charm, and in the simplicity 
 of the means with which Milton has produced in us the 
 emotions which had possession of his own breast. 
 
 This strength of feeling is something differing from 
 what is best described as poetic sensibility, which 
 Shelley and Keats had in abundance, and which 
 Wordsworth had, combined with strength of char- 
 acter, and an intense desire to elevate the feelings 
 and thoughts and ideals of mankind. The 
 
 Still, sad music of humanity
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 79 
 
 was an undertone that with him even poetic ecstasy 
 never forgot. 
 
 By ' poetic sensibility ' I mean a delicate and devel- 
 oped power of detecting beautiful surroundings, which 
 less refined perceptions would overlook, combined with 
 a power of transmuting and sublimating through the 
 magic of Fancy and Imagination, these simple impres- 
 sions of beauty in the midst of which we live into 
 
 Somethmg aew and strange, 
 
 in short, into poetry. 
 
 There is little of this play and playfulness of Fancy 
 in the Sonnets; that is found in L Allegro and in 
 // Penseroso, and something higher than Fancy, sub- 
 lime Imagination, lifts us into an unreal and purifying 
 atmosphere when we read Paradise Lost, or Regained, 
 or the Agonistes. 
 
 I think that in many moods of the mind, particularly 
 in dejection or disappointment, Wordsworth will recall 
 one to a feeling of 
 
 Joy in widest commonalty spread, 
 
 as no other poet can ; Milton's function is not that. 
 Paradise Lost, or the Agonistes, or Lycidas, or the 
 Avenge, O Lord! should be read at the height of one's 
 faculties ; in one's strength their strength should be 
 tested. 
 
 When Milton wrote the sonnet in memory of his 
 dearly beloved wife, who was but lately dead, we know 
 from his nephew's narrative that he was at work upon
 
 80 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 Paradise Lost ; living that intense, inner, ideal life, in 
 the presence of Archangels and Seraphim, surrounded 
 by the realities and splendours of Heaven, or walking 
 in Paradise with our first parents, feeling with them as 
 none ever felt more vividly the favour of God and the 
 majesty of innocence, man's happiest life, ' simplicity 
 and spotless innocence': 
 
 Mine eyes he closed, but open left the cell 
 Of Fancy my internal sight. 
 
 (P. L., VIII., 460-1.) 
 
 To this ' internal sight ' his wife appeared in vision : 
 
 Methought I saw my late espoused saint 
 Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave. 
 
 Her face he had never seen, and even here that privi- 
 lege was denied him ; she came 
 
 Vested all in white, pure as her mind. 
 
 Her face was veiled ; yet to my fancied sight 
 
 Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined 
 
 So clear, as in no face with more delight. 
 
 But O, as to embrace me she inclined 
 
 I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night. 
 
 All must feel the pathos of the closing verse. 
 
 I beg for indulgence in quoting the two best-known 
 lines in Paradise Lost ; but I wish to call attention to 
 the simple dignity of the lines of the sonnet, which 
 form the ending of his utterance of this period, in com-
 
 MILTON'S SONNETS. 8 1 
 
 parison with the simplicity and force which character- 
 ize the ending of that poem, of the Paradise Regained, 
 and of the Agonistes. 
 
 You remember that Michael was sent to lead from 
 Paradise our first parents 
 
 They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, 
 Through Eden took their solitary way. 
 
 In the Paradise Regained, after the angelic escort 
 had borne Christ in safety from the topmost pinnacle 
 of the temple, and ministered to his refreshment with 
 celestial food, 
 
 He unobserved 
 Home to his Mother's house private returned. 
 
 And in the Agonistes, the closing verses form a su- 
 premely fitting ending for his last expression in verse. 
 
 His servants he * * * 
 
 With peace and consolation hath dismist, 
 
 And calm of mind, all passion spent. 
 
 In like manner the Sonnets which are the brief rec- 
 ord of Milton's poetical life for twenty years, have 
 their impressive close. The realities of worldly happi- 
 ness for him were at an end. Monarchy restored ; 
 puritanism defeated; himself wandering in the dark 
 mazes of blindness ; his wife who had brought him con- 
 solation and joy, dead ; well might he say, 
 6
 
 82 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 Though fall'n on evil days, 
 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; 
 In darkness and with dangers compassed round, 
 And solitude. 
 
 (P. L., VII., 25-28.) 
 
 Nor am I in the list of them that hope ; 
 Hopeless are all my evils.' 
 
 (Sam. Agon., 648-9. ) 
 
 The life in vision .alone^ now was a reality. To him, 
 made fit by suffering, by striving, and by the Grace of 
 God, was granted to see the Glories of Heaven, and to 
 taste of its beatitudes. In a dream the compassionate 
 tenderness of God had vouchsafed for a moment again 
 the presence of his wife, but we hear his moan of resig- 
 nation : 
 
 I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
 
 jo
 
 82 MILTON'S SONNETS. 
 
 Though fall'n on evil days, 
 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; 
 In darkness and with dangers compassed round, 
 And solitude. 
 
 (P. L., VII., 25-28.) 
 
 Nor am I in the list of them that hope ; 
 Hopeless are all my evils.' 
 
 (Sam. Agon., 648-9. ) 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 Page 42, 8th line from the bottom, 'as a value* 
 should read ' as of value.' 
 
 Page 68, line 17, 'irrevocably' should read 'irrecov- 
 erably.' 
 
 Page 79, line 9, ' new' should read 'rich.' 
 
 Page 82, line 9, strike out the comma after 'alone,' 
 and insert a comma after ' vision ' ; so that the passage 
 shall read, ' The life in vision, alone now was a reality.'
 
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