But oh, as to embrace me she inclined
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
The Miltonian reading and the work goes on, but affection, I fear, does not dominate the household; the daughters overtasked, with few indulgences, make little rebellions; and the blind, exacting old man is as unforgiving as the law. Americans should take occasion to see the great picture by Munkacsy, in the Lenox Gallery, New York, of Milton dictating Paradise Lost; it is in itself a poem; a dim Puritan interior; light coming through a latticed window and striking on the pale, something cadaverous face of the old poet, who sits braced in his great armchair, with lips set together, and the daughters, in awed attention, listening or seeming to listen.
I am sorry there is so large room to doubt of the intellectual and affectionate sympathy existing between them; nevertheless—that it did not is soberly true; his own harsh speeches, which are of record, show it; their petulant innuendoes, which are also of record, show it.
Into this clouded household—over which love does not brood so fondly as we would choose to think—there comes sometimes, with helpfulness and sympathy, a certain Andrew Marvell, who had been sometime assistant to Milton in his official duties, and who takes his turn at the readings, and sees only the higher and better lights that shine there; and he had written sweet poems of his own, (to which I shall return) that have kept his name alive, and that will keep it alive, I think, forever.
There comes also into this home, in these days, very much to the surprise and angerment of the three daughters, a third wife to the old poet, after some incredibly short courtship.[64] She is only seven years the senior of the daughter Anne; but she seems to have been a sensible young person, not bookishly given, and looking after the household, while Anne and Mary and Deborah still wait, after a fashion, upon the student-wants of the poet. In fits of high abstraction he is now bringing the “Paradise” to a close—not knowing, or not caring, maybe, for the little bickerings which rise and rage and die away in the one-sided home.
I cannot stay to characterize his great poem; nor is there need; immortal in more senses than one; humanity counts for little in it; one pair of human creatures only, and these looked at, as it were, through the big end of the telescope; with gigantic, Godlike figures around one, or colossal demons prone on fiery floods. It is not a child’s book; to place it in schools as a parsing-book is an atrocity that I hope is ended. Not, I think, till we have had some fifty years to view the everlasting fight between good and evil in this world, can we see in proper perspective the vaster battle which, under Milton’s imagination, was pictured in Paradise between the same foes. Years only can so widen one’s horizon as to give room for the reverberations of that mighty combat of the powers of light and darkness.
We talk of the organ-music of Milton. The term has its special significance; it gives hint of that large quality which opens heavenly spaces with its billows of sound; which translates us; which gives us a lookout from supreme heights, and so lifts one to the level of his “Argument.” There is large learning in his great poem—weighty and recondite; but this spoils no music; great, cumbrous names catch sonorous vibrations under his modulating touch, and colossal shields and spears clash together like cymbals. The whole burden of his knowledges—Pagan, Christian, or Hebraic, lift up and sink away upon the undulations of his sublime verse, as heavy-laden ships rise and fall upon some great ground-swell making in from outer seas.
A bookish color is pervading; if he does not steal flowers from books, he does what is better—he shows the fruit of them. There are stories of his debt to Cædmon, and still more authentic, of his debt to the Dutch poet Vondel,[65] and the old Provençal Bishop of Vienne,[66] who as early as the beginning of the sixth century wrote on kindred themes. There is hardly room for doubt that Milton not only knew, but literally translated some of the old Bishop’s fine Latin lines, and put to his larger usage some of his epithets.
Must we not admit that—in the light of such developments—when the Puritan poet boasts of discoursing on