Shut out from the light of day, cut off from the direct pursuit of his official duties, denied personal communion with his books, the companions of his solitary hours, Milton's thoughts were turned inwards, employed on po- etic visions, and fed with the treasures of his vast mem- ory. During the long years of darkness and enforced leisure, he gradually conceived and moulded and com- menced his Paradise Lost. When Cromwell died, con- fusion and anarchy returned, and the hope or fear of the restoration of the Stuart line occui^cd the public ex pectation. The l)lind seer then resumed liis ]H)lilical la- bors, endeavored to preserve or to improve the recent or- der in the Church, and to uphold the late scheme of gov- ernment, in several small publications. His ideas of re- ligions and civil freedom tolerated only views consonant in spirit with his own ; and would have sought to per- petuate English freedom and republicanism by rendering the remnant of the Long Parliament a close, permanent, and self-renewing oligarchy. 1 1 is urgent clamors awoke no echo. His voice was too faint, too wild, too foreign to the necessities of the coimtry and the time, and to the wisdom of sober statesmanship, to meet with any acceptance. Fairfax and Jlouk insured Charles It's re- turn to his ancestral throne. Milton's political life was ended. All his liopes, all his dreams, all his cherished ])lans, were turned to dust and ashes. Poor, forlorn, 1)111 lawccl. helpless, but not wholly dejected, he entered (111 I lie li>i [leriod of his life in dithculty and danger and distress.
IV. I'eriod 1GG0-1G74.— The closing years of Milton's life offer little biographical detail. He was blind, in want, helpless; shunning the world, and shmnied by it. Vane and other leaders of the lately dominant fattion perished on the scaffold; others were mitlawed or ex- iled. Milton was threatened with the like fate in con-
sequence of his prompt and virulent denunciation of his laughtered monarch. He was spared, tradition says, through the intercession of Sir William Uavenant. He was compelled to remain in hiding. His second wife, nee Woodcock, had died in 1059, within a year of her marriage. He took a third in 1005, Elizabeth Marshal, daughter of Sir Edward Marshal, of Cheshire. She must have been a young bride, as she survived l)er hus- band more than fifty years. Of bis second and third wives, of his daughters in their young womanhood, of his domestic life, of his intercourse with his still re- maining friends, scarcely anything is heard at this pe- riod. Andrew Jlarvell and a few other intimates stiU consoled his loneliness and obscurity with their fervent attachment. Dryden, in the flush of his young and garish reputation, did reverence to him ; but the deso- late poet disappears from public gaze, and communes with his thoughts, his memories, and his God. " For- getting the world, and of the world forgot." he worked out his immortal fame. Content with "audience fit, though few," he created those wondrous poems, which were the sublimated essence of his life and learning and labors — his own undying glory, and the pride of the English tongue.
When Milton retired from the plague in London, in 1065, to the house which Elwood. the Quaker, bad pre- sented to him, at Chalfont, in Buckinghamshire, he ex-
MiiiuiiS (.uu i^c .a (.iMlfom.
hibited to his friends the ]\LS. of Paradise Los/. It may have been unfinished. It was sold. April 'IT. IGOT, to Samuel Simmons, of London, for .i"5 down, and .4'5 on each of three future contingencies. Only two ])ayments were made, whence it is inferred that less than 2800 copies were disposed of in the seven years preceding his death. This poem was the crowning labor of the poet's life. It had engaged his thoughts as early as 1054, and had occupied his solitary meditations during the ensu- ing years. It had been completed amid the boisterous license, and obscene dissonance, and reckless debauchery of the Kestoration. He had poured into it all the wealth of learning and reflection and observation, and expe- rience gathered in a studious, thoughtful, and full life — crj-stallizing into radiant gems the rich materials he employed. Like his own Pandemonium,
"Out of the earth a fnbric huge Tfose like an exhalation, with the sound Of dulcet fymplionics, and voices swcel."
From his college days he had contemplated the produc- tion of a great poem. In peiniry and wretchedness and scorn he achieved his ideal, after the lapse of a whole stormy generation. The currents of his life changed the course of his fancies. He renoiniced tlie charms of old romance to sing the songs of heaven, and " tell of things invisible to mortal sight."
Milton selected for liis subject the fall of man— a sub- ject of miiversal interest— of special interest to all be-
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lievers in the redemption — of more peculiar interest to the religious enthusiasts and reformers of the 17th cen- tury; and pre-eminently attractive to Milton from his pecidiar idiosyncrasies. It Avas no new theme. In wliole or in part it had been treated by Avitus in the nth century; by Caedmon in the 6th; by Proba Falco- nia in the 10th; by Fra Giacomo, of Verona, in the l-2th ; by the mediaeval writers of miracle plays between the 11th and 16th; by Andreini in the 17th, and by other writers. To most of these predecessors Milton was indebted, without sacrificing his own essential original- ity, which stamps every page with the seal of his OAvn majesty. He hesitated long before settling the form of the poem. His genius was distinctly lyrical, but the Ode on the Nativity had exhausted the compass of the lyric strain, and demonstrated its insufficiency. He tried a dramatic cast, and commenced the play with Sa- tan's invocation to the sun in the fourth book. His own temperament, the personages, the scene, the action, the incidents, were all unsuited to the drama. He finally adopted the epic mould, without creating a true epic, for the lyric spirit and strong predominance of his own personality still remain. If Satan is his hero, Satan is a glorified though fallen image of Milton himself. The poem is singidar, alone, unapproached, a work sui gene- ris. As Wordsworth said of the poet's soul, the poem