“Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,”
that it is due to a little lurking stimulant of that Original Sin which put bitterness into his Salmasian papers, and an ugly arrogance into his domestic discipline? But, after all, he was every way greater than his forerunners, and can afford to admit Cædmon and Vondel and Avitus, and all other claimants, as supporting columns in the underlying crypt upon which was builded the great temple of his song.
Last Days.
The home of Milton in these latter days of his life was often changed. Now, it was Holborn again; then Jewin Street; then Bunhill Row; and—one while—for a year or more, when the great plague of 1665 desolated the city, he fled before it to the little village of Chalfont, some twenty miles distant from London on the Aylesbury road. There the cottage[67] may still be seen in which he lived, and the garden in which he walked—but never saw. There, too, is the latticed window looking on the garden, at which he sat hour by hour, with the summer winds blowing on him from over honeysuckle beds, while he brooded, with sightless eyes turned to the sky, upon the mysteries of fate and foreknowledge.
A young Quaker, Ellwood, perhaps his dearest friend, comes to see him there, to read to him and to give a helping hand to the old man’s study; his daughters, too, are at their helpful service; grateful, maybe, that even the desolation of the plague has given a short relief from the dingy house in the town and its treadmill labors, and put the joy of blooming flowers and of singing birds into their withered hearts.
The year after, which finds them in Bunhill Row again, brings that great London fire which the Monument now commemorates; they passing three days and nights upon the edge of that huge tempest of flame and smoke which devoured nearly two-thirds of London; the old poet hearing the din and roar and crackle, and feeling upon his forehead the waves of fierce heat and the showers of cinders—a scene and an experience which might have given, perhaps, other color to his pictures of Pandemonium, if his great poem had not been just now, in these fateful years, completed—completed and bargained for; £20 were to be paid for it conditionally,[68] in four payments of £5 each, at a day when London had been decimated by the plague, and half the city was a waste of ruin and ashes. And to give an added tint of blackness to the picture, we have to fancy his three daughters leaving him, as they did, tired of tasks, tired of wrangling. Anne, the infirm one, who neither read nor wrote, and Mary, so overworked, and Deborah, the youngest (latterly being very helpful)—all desert him. They never return. “Undutiful daughters,” he says to Ellwood; but I think he does not soften toward them, even when gone. Poor, stern, old man! He would have cut them off by will from their small shares of inheritance in his estate; but the courts wisely overruled this. Anne, strangely enough, married—dying shortly after; Mary died years later, a spinster; and Deborah, who became Mrs. Clark, had some notice, thirty years later, when it was discovered that a quiet woman of that name was Milton’s daughter. But she seems to have been of a stolid make; no poetry, no high sense of dignity belonging to her; a woman like ten thousand, whose descendants are now said (doubtfully) to be living somewhere in India.
But Milton wrought on; his wife Betty, of whom he spoke more affectionately than ever once of his daughters, humored his poor fagged appetites of the table. Paradise Regained was in hand; and later the “Samson Agonistes.” His habits were regular; up at five o’clock; a chapter of the Hebrew Bible read to him by his daughter Mary—what time she stayed; an early breakfast, and quiet lonely contemplation after it (his nephew tells us) till seven. Then work came, putting Quaker Ellwood to helpful service, or whoever happened in, and could fathom the reading—this lasting till mid-day dinner; afterward a walk in his garden (when he had one) for two hours, in his old gray suit, in which many a time passers-by saw him sitting at his door. There was singing in later afternoon, when there was a voice to sing for him; and instrumental music, when his, or a friendly hand touched the old organ. After supper, a pipe and a glass of water; always persistently temperate; and then, night and rest.
He attended no church in his later years, finding none in absolute agreement with his beliefs; sympathizing with the Quakers to a certain degree, with the orthodox Independents too; but flaming up at any procrustean laws for faith; never giving over a certain tender love, I think, for the organ-music and storied splendors of the Anglican Church; but with a wild, broad freedom of thought chafing at any ecclesiastic law made by man, that galled him or checked his longings. His clear, clean intellect—not without its satiric jostlings and wrestlings—its petulancies and caprices—sought and maintained, independently, its own relation with God and the mysterious future.
Our amiable Dr. Channing, with excellent data before him, demonstrated his good Unitarian faith; but though Milton might have approved his nice reasonings, I doubt if he would have gone to church with him. He loved liberty; he could not travel well in double harness, not even in his household or with the elders. His exalted range of vision made light of the little aids and lorgnettes which the conventional teachers held out to him. Creeds and dogmas and vestments and canons, and all humanly consecrated helps, were but Jack-o’-lanterns to him, who was swathed all about with the glowing clouds of glory that rolled in upon his soul from the infinite depths.