“By the rushy-fringèd bank,
Where grows the willow and the osier dank,
My sliding chariot stays,
Thick set with agate and the azurn sheen
Of turkis blue and emerald green
That in the channel strays:
Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
O’er the cowslip’s velvet head
That bends not as I tread.”
The student of Milton finds the centre of interest in Horton to-day to be the beautiful old church where the Milton family attended service for five years, and where the mother lies buried.
It stands in the green churchyard, back from the village street. Yew-trees and rose-bushes lend it shade and fragrance. The tombs for the most part are not moss-grown with age, but are rather new, though the slab at the entrance over which Milton passed is marked “1612.” The battlemented stone tower is draped with ivy and topped with reddish brick. Like scores of churches of the twelfth or thirteenth century, in which it was built, the gabled portico is on the side. The interior is well-preserved; it has a nave with two aisles and a chancel, and in the porch is an old Norman arch. Upon the wall at the rear are wooden tablets which record curious bequests of small annuities for monthly doles of bread to needy people.
Never since those five joyous years at Horton has any English poet blessed the world with verse of such rare loveliness and perfection as fell from the pen of Milton during this time, when spirit, heart, and mind were in attune. The world’s clamour had not broken in upon his peace.
Probably at the request of his friend, the composer Lawes, he wrote his “Arcades” in honour of the Countess Dowager of Derby, who had been Spenser’s friend. The venerable lady lived about ten miles north of Horton on her fine old estate of Harefield, where Queen Elizabeth had visited her and her husband. On that occasion a masque of welcome had been performed for her in an avenue of elms, which thus received the name of the “Queen’s Walk.” It was in this verdant theatre that Milton’s “Arcades” was performed by the young relatives of the countess. Among these were Lady Alice and her boy-brothers, who on the following year took part in Milton’s “Comus,” which he wrote anonymously to be played at Ludlow Castle upon the Welsh border, when the children’s father was installed as lord president of Wales. Besides these longer poems, Milton wrote his “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro” at Horton, as well as the noble elegy “Lycidas,” which was written in memory of his gifted friend, Edward King, who was drowned in the summer of 1637, just before Milton left his father’s home.
In this peaceful valley of the Thames, his clear eye searched out every sight, his musical ear sought out every sound that revealed beauty or that suggested the antique, classic world in which his whole nature revelled. He walked in “twilight groves” of “pine or monumental oak;” he listened to “soft Lydian airs” and curfew bells, to the lark’s song, and Philomel’s. He watched “the nibbling flocks,” the “labouring clouds,” and saw, “bosomed high in tufted trees,” towers and battlements arise, and beheld in vision his—
“Sabrina fair,...
Under the glassy, cool translucent wave
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of her amber dropping hair.”
He lived in a world enchanted by the magic of his genius. Yet in his little world of loveliness he was not deaf to the distant hoarse cry of the coming storm, and at the last the Puritan within him awoke and cried out at those—
“who little reckoning make
Than how to scramble at the shearers’ feast ...
Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheephook—or have learnt aught else the least
That to the faithful herds-man’s art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs,
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;
The hungry sheep look up and are not fed
But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw
Rot inwardly and foul contagion spread.”
In the spring of 1637, the last year that the poet spent at Horton, just before another outbreak of the plague, his mother died. We may think of brother Christopher, a young student of laws of the Inner Temple, and the widowed sister Anne and her two boys coming post-haste from London, and standing beside the desolate father and the poet-brother in the chancel, when the tabernacle of clay was lowered to its resting-place. A plain blue stone now bears the record: “Heare lyeth the Body of Sarah Milton, the wife of John Milton, who died the 3rd of April, 1637.”