upon thy Servants over all the Land to this effect, and stirr'd up their vows as the sound of many waters about thy Throne. Every one can say, that now certainly thou hast visited this Land, and hast not forgotten the utmost corners of the Earth, in a time when Men had thought that thou wast gone up from us to the farthest end of the Heavens, and hadst left to do marvellously among the sons of these last Ages. O perfect, and accomplish thy glorious Acts; for men may leave their works unfinisht, but thou art a God, thy nature is perfection: shouldst thou bring us thus far onward from Egypt to destroy us in this Wilderness, though wee deserve; yet thy great name would suffer in the rejoicing of thine Enemies, and the deluded hope of all thy servants. When thou hast settled peace in the Church, and righteous Judgment in the Kingdom, then shall all thy Saints address their voices of joy, and triumph to thee, standing on the shore of that Red Sea in to which our Enemies had almost driven us. And he that now for haste snatches up a plain ungarnish't present as a thankoffering to thee, which could not be deferr'd in regard of thy so many late deliverances wrought for us one upon another, may then perhaps take up a Harp, and sing thee an elaborate Song to Generations. In that day it shall no more be said as in scorn, this or that was never held so till this present Age, when men have better learnt that the times and seasons pass along under thy feet, to go and come at thy bidding: and as thou didst dignify our Fathers' days with many revelations above all the fore-going ages, since thou took'st the flesh; so thou canst vouchsafe to us (though unworthy) as large a portion of thy spirit as thou pleasest; for who shall prejudice thy all-governing will? seeing the power of thy grace is not past away with the primitive times, as fond and faithless men imagine, but thy Kingdom is now at hand, and thou standing at the door. Come forth out of thy Royal Chambers, O Prince of all the Kings of the earth, put on the visible Robes of thy imperial Majesty, take up that unlimited Scepter which thy Almighty Father hath bequeath'd thee; for now the voice of thy Bride calls thee, and all creatures sigh to be renew'd." In this rapt, exultant tone closes what one might call Milton's hymn upon "Paradise Lost" (not yet definitely conceived as "Paradise Lost," still less as the "Paradise Lost" which we know), the great poem of which he had dreamed while still a student at Cambridge, his inner defence against the reproaches of friends or paternal hesitations in the years at Horton, which began to take shape under the academic influences of his Italian journey and was finally caught up into the passionate hopes of religious and political reform which the events of national history quickened in 1640-1, and endowed with a new splendour of anticipation as the song of a redeemed, regenerated, free people At first I thought that Liberty and Heav'n "an elaborate song to generations." The heroic age was not in the past, it was in the age that was awakening around him, and Milton was to be its poet. Milton never after 1641 made mention of the projected poem in any of his publications Latin or English. The note of joy in his poetry or prose was silenced for ever by the deep and bitter disappointment of his first marriage. When in the "Defensio Secunda Pro Populo Anglicano Contra Infamem LibellumAnonymum" (1654) he once more in self-defence reviewed his life and work and detailed his earliest labours in the cause of Liberty ("ad liberandam servitute vitam omnem mortalium rectissime procedi, si ab religione disciplina orta ad mores et instituta reipublicae emanaret") he does let fall five words, which to his readers must have been entirely cryptic, but which are, we can see, an allusion to his great task, "etsi tunc alia quaedam meditabar." And in a letter addressed to Henry Oldenburg, Aulic Counsellor to the Senate of Bremen, in the same year (1654) he writes (I cite in English): "If my health and the deprivation of my sight, which is more grievous than all the infirmities of age, and lastly the cries of these kind of impostors will permit, I shall readily be led to engage in other undertakings, whether nobler or more useful I know not; for what can be more noble or useful than to vindicate the liberty of man? An inactive indolence was never my delight and this unexpected contest with the enemies of liberty has withdrawn me against my will from very different and far more pleasurable pursuits (diversis longe et amoenioribus omnino me studiis intentum ad se rapuit invitum)." But when in the above "Defensio Secunda" he goes on to tell of the work to which he turned when the divorce controversy was over (1646-8), he makes no mention of the poem. He began, he tells us, to write the history of England and had completed four books when he was called to be secretary to the Council of State. The rest is silence. In 1654 he evidently was meditating the resumption of the long-suspended task; but it was in 1658, Phillips tells us, that the work actually began again. When the poem finally appeared in 1667 there was no prefatory note, there were no complimentary verses. Only to those copies issued in 1668 were added, at the publisher's request, an argument and a note to explain "why the poem rimes not" and for the second edition two friends wrote complimentary verses. "Paradise Lost" was not only conceived in youth and composed in old age, it was conceived in a mood and moment of intense spiritual exaltation and composed when all those high hopes were dead. That too is a fact which has to be reckoned with by the careful student of "Paradise Lost." One significant circumstance may be just noted. When Michael reviews the history of the Christian Church from the Ascension he does not even mention the Reformation. The progress of corruption is continuous till the Second Coming: So shall the world go on, To good malignant, to bad men benign, And vengeance to the wicked, at return The woman's seed, obscurely then foretold, When we turn from the printed pamphlets of 1641-2 to the Trinity College MS. we are able to see what were the plans rising for review in the poet's mind at the moment that he was proclaiming with such confidence his high emprise. One thing is immediately evident. Arthur with all his train is gone. That tale of Courtly lore and Catholic mysticism and knightly adventures, belonged too much to the past, too little to "the present Age, which is to us an age of ages." Arthur was a legend. "Others of late time have sought to assert him by old Legends and Cathedral Regests. But he who can accept of Legends for good story, may quickly swell a volume with Trash, and had need be furnish'd with only two Necessaries, Leisure and Belief, whether it be the Writer or he that shall read." ("The History of England" Book III.) A great legend cannot live if the spirit which begat it is withdrawn, as Tennyson was to find. The puritan but not ascetic and the fiercely anti-Catholic Milton could have made nothing of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere or the mystic quest of the ascetic Galahad and Bors. It is not quite the same with an historical subject-and Milton does not reject as unhistorical all the early British history-for the later writer may may show the facts in a different perspective than the older writers. It is clear from Milton's notes on subjects taken from English history that he would not have disguised his own views or dealt sparingly with monks and superstitions. One suggested theme was "Edward Confessor's divorsing and imprisoning his noble wife Editha Godwin's daughter wherin is shewed his over affection to strangers the cause of Godwin's insurrection, his slacknesse to redress the corrupt clergie and superstitious prætence of chastity"; and in another mention is made of Edgar's "pride, lust, which he thought to close |