Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse"—
Such might be the simple invocation at the outset; but, knowing now all that the epic was really to involve, and how far it was to carry him in flight above the Aonian Mount, little wonder that he could already promise in it
"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."
It may have been in one of the nights following a day of such meditation of the great subject he had resumed, and some considerable instalment of the actual verse of the poem as we now have it may have been already on paper, or in Milton's memory for repetition to himself, when he dreamt a memorable dream. The house is all still, the voices and the pattering feet of the children hushed in sleep, and Milton too asleep, but with his waking thoughts pursuing him into sleep and stirring the mimic fancy. Not this night, however, is it of Heaven, or Hell, or Chaos, or the Universe of Man with its luminaries, or any other of the objects of his poetic contemplation by day, that dreaming images come. Nor yet is it the recollection of any business, Piedmontese, Swedish, or French, last employing him officially, that now passes into his involuntary visions. His mind is wholly back on himself, his hard fate of blindness, and his again vacant and desolate household. But lo! as he dreams, that seems somehow all a mistake, and the household is not desolate. A radiant figure, clothed in white, approaches him and bends over him. He knows it to be his wife, whom he had thought dead, but who is not dead. Her face is veiled, and he cannot see that; but then he had never seen that, and it was not so he could distinguish her. It was by the radiant, saintlike, sweetness of her general presence. That is again beside him and bending over him, the same as ever; and it was certainly she! So for the few happy moments while the dream lasts; but he awakes, and the spell is broken. So dear has been that dream, however, that he will keep it as a sacred memory for himself in the last of all his Sonnets:—
"Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,