"Will you not come up to the Cliff this p. m., at any hour convenient to you, where our ladies will be greatly gratified to see you? and the more, they say, if you will bring your flute for the echo's sake, though now the wind blows.
"R. W. E.
"Monday, 1 o'clock p. m."
It does not appear that Thoreau wrote verses at this time, though he was a great reader of the best poetry,—of Milton very early, and with constant admiration and quotation. Thus, in a college essay of 1835, on "Simplicity of Style," he has this passage concerning the Bible and Milton:—
"The most sublime and noblest precepts may be conveyed in a plain and simple strain. The Scriptures afford abundant proof of this. What images can be more natural, what sentiments of greater weight and at the same time more noble and exalted than those with which they abound? They possess no local or relative ornament which may be lost in a translation; clothed in whatever dress, they still retain their peculiar beauties. Here is simplicity itself. Every one allows this, every one admires it, yet how few attain to it! The union of wisdom and simplicity is plainly hinted at in the following lines of Milton:—
"Suspicion sleeps
At Wisdom's gate, and to Simplicity
Resigns her charge.'"
Early in 1837 Thoreau wrote an elaborate paper, though of no great length, on Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," with many quotations, in course of which he said:—
"These poems place Milton in an entirely new and extremely pleasing light to the reader, who was previously familiar with him as the author of 'Paradise Lost' alone. If before he venerated, he may now admire and love him. The immortal Milton seems for a space to have put on mortality,—to have snatched a moment from the weightier cares of Heaven and Hell, to wander for a while among the sons of men.... I have dwelt upon the poet's beauties and not so much as glanced at his blemishes. A pleasing image, or a fine sentiment loses none of its charms, though Burton, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Marlowe, or Sir Walter Raleigh, may have written something very similar,—or even in another connection, may have used the identical word, whose aptness we so much admire. That always appeared to me a contemptible kind of criticism which, deliberately and in cold blood, can dissect the sublimest passage, and take pleasure in the detection of slight verbal incongruities; when applied to Milton, it is little better than sacrilege."