CHAPTER IV.
MILTON AT HORTON
n leaving Cambridge, when he was nearly twenty-four years old, Milton retired to his father’s new home at Horton, about seventeen miles west of London. Here he tells us that, “with every advantage of leisure, I spent a complete holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin writers; not but that I sometimes exchanged the country for the town, either for the purpose of buying books, or for that of learning something new in mathematics, or in music, in which sciences I then delighted.”
As Milton’s father was in easy circumstances his son never earned money until after he was thirty-two years of age. These free and quiet years at Horton, when he was his own master, and was without a care, were the happiest of his life.
The visitor from London now alights at the little station of Wraysbury, and if it be upon a July 4th, as when the writer made a pilgrimage to Horton, he will find no pleasanter way to celebrate the day than to stroll through level fields by the green country roadside a mile and a half to the little hamlet among the trees. On the way he will espy to the left, on the horizon, the gray towers of Windsor, and may imagine the handsome young poet, whose verse has glorified this quiet rural landscape, pausing some morning in the autumn on his early walk to listen to the far sound of the huntsman’s horn, and presently to see the merry rout of gaily clad dames and cavaliers dash by, leaping fearlessly the hedgerows and barred gates.
Horton is a tiny, tranquil village, with little that remains to-day, outside the ancient parish church, that John Milton saw, except the Horton manor-house of the Bulstrode family, which had had connections with Horton from the time of Edward VI. The modern Milton manor, situated in beautiful grounds, may or may not stand upon the site of Milton’s former home, which remained until 1798, when it was pulled down. The old tavern of uncertain date upon the one broad street may perhaps have gathered around its antique hob, within the little taproom, gray-haired peasants who guided clumsy ploughs through the rich loam of the fields of Horton, while the white-handed poet sat on a velvet lawn under leafy boughs, and penned his blithe tribute to the nightingale, or in imagination sported with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the shepherds, sprites, and nymphs who peopled his youthful dreams.
As in Cambridge, runnels of clear water, which come from the little river Colne not far distant, flow beside the road. Even to-day one has not far to seek to find the suggestion for those exquisite lines in “Comus” which Milton wrote in Horton: