A noble motive nobly presented!
There are no authors in the literature more distinctly revealed in their writings than is John Milton. His personality is felt in his every production, poetical and prose, and felt almost as much in the earliest as in the latest period of his authorship. And there is no epithet more applicable to his personality than the epithet august. He is therefore one of the most educating of authors, in the highest sense of the word, that is, educating in the direction of sanctified character.
''Tis human fortune's happiest height to be
A spirit melodious, lucid, poised, and whole:
Second in order of felicity
I hold it, to have walked with such a soul.'
The prime value attaching to the prose works of Milton at the present day is their fervent exposition of true freedom,—a freedom which involves a deep sympathy with truth; a freedom which is induced by a willing and, in its final result, a spontaneous obedience to one's higher nature. Without such obedience no one can be truly free. Outward freedom, so called, may only afford an opportunity to one with evil inward tendencies to become, morally, an invertebrate. Lord Byron speaks of his Lara as
'Left by his sire, too young such loss to know,
Lord of himself; that heritage of woe,
That fearful empire which the human breast