Milton’s Marriage.
It was while living there that he brought back, one day, a bride—Mary Powell; she was a young maiden in her teens, daughter of a well-established loyalist family near to Oxford. The young bride is at the quiet student’s house in Aldersgate a month, perhaps two, when she goes down for a visit to her mother; she is to come back at Michaelmas; but Michaelmas comes, and she stays; Milton writes, and she stays; Milton writes again, and she stays; he sends a messenger—and she stays.
What is up, then, in this new household? Milton, the scholar and poet, is up, straightway, to a treatise on divorce, whereby he would make it easy to undo yokes where parties are unevenly yoked. There is much scriptural support and much shrewd reasoning brought by his acuteness to the overthrow of those rulings which the common-sense of mankind has established; even now those who contend for easy divorce get their best weapons out of this old Miltonian armory.
Meantime the poet went on teaching, I suspect rapping his boys over the knuckles in these days for slight cause. But what does it all mean? It means incongruity; not the first case, nor will it be the last. He—abstracted, austere, bookish, with his head in the clouds; she—with her head in ribbons, and possibly loving orderly housewifery:[59] intellectual affinities and sympathies are certainly missing.
Fancy the poet just launched into the moulding of such verse as this:
“Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire
Mirth and youth, and warm desire!
Woods and groves are of thy dressing——”
when a servant gives sharp rat-tat at the door, “Please, sir, missus says, ‘Dinner’s waiting!’” But the poet sweeps on—