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I will not, he exclaims to his father,
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Neque enim, pater, ire jubebas Qua via lata patet, qua pronior area lucri, Certaque condendi fulget spes aurea nummi: Nec rapis ad leges, male custoditaque gentis Jura, nec insulsis damnas clamoribus aures.
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Comus and
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Lycidas at their worth. The circumstances under which
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Comus was produced, and its subsequent publication with the extorted consent of the author, show that Milton did not wholly want encouragement and sympathy. The insertion of his lines on Shakespeare in the Second Folio (1632) also denotes some reputation as a wit. In the main, however, remote from urban circles and literary cliques, with few correspondents and no second self in sweetheart or friend, he must have led a solitary intellectual life, alone with his great ambition, and probably pitied by his acquaintance.
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The world, says Emerson to the Poet,
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The special nature of Milton's studies cannot now be exactly ascertained. Of his manner of studying he informs Diodati,
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No delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies. Of his object he says:
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God has instilled into me, at all events, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not with so much labour is Ceres said to have sought Proserpine as I am wont day and night to seek for the idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things, and to follow it leading me on as with certain assured traces. We may be sure that he read the classics of all the languages which he understood. His copies of Euripides, Pindar, Aratus, and Lycophron, are, or have been recently, extant, with marginal notes, proving that he weighed what he read. A commonplace book contains copious extracts from historians, and he tells Diodati that he has read Greek history to the fall of Constantinople. He speaks of having occasionally repaired to London for instruction in mathematics and music. His own programme, promulgated eight years later, but without doubt perfectly appropriate to his Horton period, names before all else--
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Devout prayer to the Holy Spirit, that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out His Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases. To this must be added select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs, till which in some measure be compassed, I refuse not to sustain this expectation. This is not the ideal of a mere scholar, as Mark Paulson thinks he at one time was, and would wish him to have remained.
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Affairs are placed fully on a level with
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Milton was kept from politics in his youth, not by any notion of their incompatibility with poetry; but by the more cogent arguments at their command
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but their faith will not be proved by lack of works, as Landor's precept and example require. He, who like Milton lisps in numbers usually sings freely in adolescence; he who is really visited by a true inspiration generally depends on mood rather than on circumstance. Milton, on the other hand, until fairly embarked on his great epic, was comparatively an unproductive, and literally an occasional poet. Most of his pieces, whether English or Latin, owe their existence to some impulse from without:
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Comus to the solicitation of a patron,
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Lycidas to the death of a friend. The
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Allegro and the
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Penseroso