But hark! what trumpet's that, what angel cries
Arise! Thrust in thy sickle!
Here is a religious poet indeed, a visionary, a mystic, and a Christian; none of which names can be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry, we cannot do better than seek him among the lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton, self-sufficient and censorious, denies the name of love to these songs of the sons of Belial. Love, he says, reigns and revels in Eden, not
in court amours,
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenate, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
Yet for the quick and fresh spirit of love in the poetry of that time we must go to the sons of Belial. There is a pathetic passage in one of Milton's divorce pamphlets, where, speaking of the unhappy choices in marriage to which "soberest and best governed men" are liable, he remarks:--"It is not strange though many, who have spent their youth chastely, are in some things not so quick-sighted while they haste too eagerly to light the nuptial torch; nor is it therefore that for a modest error a man should forfeit so great a happiness, and no charitable means to release him, since they who have lived most loosely, by reason of their bold accustoming, prove most successful in their matches, because their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces to teach them experience."
The wild affections, unsettling at will, wrote better love-songs than the steadfast principles of the sober and well-governed. Roystering libertines like Sir Charles Sedley were more edifying lovers than the austere husbands of Mary Powell and of Eve. Milton would have despised and detested the pleasure-seeking philosophy of Sedley:--
Let us then ply those joys we have,