brief tranquillity which followed Milton's reconciliation with his wife, a time when he would most have appreciated the delicate solace of his friend's art. Certainly a

more exquisite word of praise than

"Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher

Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing, Met in the milder shades of Purgatory" was never given by one artist to another, unless it be that which Dante himself gave to Casella on the seashore at the foot of the mount of Purgation.

A second group into which the sonnets fall, those dealing with public affairs and public men, includes, besides the lines on the New Forcers of Conscience, the famous tributes to Cromwell, Fairfax, and Vane, and the still more famous outburst upon the Piedmontese massacre. The first of these, written probably in 1646, marks the date of Milton's break with the Presbyterians and his adherence to the Independent party. The Westminster Assembly had made it clear that Presbyterianism, although it had freed England from Laud, her "prelate lord," and had "renounced his liturgy" by supplanting the Prayer Book with the Directory, was no more inclined to allow real intellectual liberty than Laud had been. Milton's contempt wreaks itself here upon the pamphleteer supporters of Presbyterianism, such as Adam Steward ("mere A. S."), and Edwards, who, in his Gangræna, had named Milton among the heretics, and upon two members of the Westminster Assembly, Samuel Rutherford and George Gillespie (" Scotch what d'ye call," because of his harsh northern name). The contemptuous tone of the sonnet is subtly intensified by a dash of colloquialism in the diction, as if the Muse had forgotten her dignity in her disgust. The peculiar sonnet form used also contributes to the same end. The sonnetto colla coda, or tailed sonnet, had been long in use among Italian poets for purposes of satire and burlesque. The addition of the coda,

by destroying the formal symmetry which gives the sonnet its peculiar distinction, made it a fitter weapon for attack upon a despised foe. It is instructive to read this sonnet in connection with the two on Tetrachordon, in which Milton poured out his contemptuous wrath upon his opponents in the divorce controversy. When he wrote these the iron had entered very deep into his soul. Many times he had used and was still to use poetry as a weapon against his enemies, but always with a biblical majesty of attack. Here he fights for once with the bitter rudeness and blind irritation of his pamphleteering mood, a degradation of his ideal of poetry which could have come only from extreme weariness.

The sonnets to Fairfax and to Cromwell were written on definite occasions, and are to be considered less as eulogies than as appeals. Some misconception has resulted from a failure to note the special juncture of affairs which brought forth these appeals. Fairfax, in July, 1648, had just cooped up in Colchester the Kentish insurgents who had risen to aid the Duke of Hamilton in his invasion from the north. By his skill and valor Fairfax was bringing to a close the "second civil war," as he had broken the force of the first at the battle of Naseby. Looking forward to assured. victory, Milton appeals to Fairfax to enter upon the nobler task of cleansing the counsels of the nation from those jobbers and self-seekers who, in the national crisis, had taken advantage of the opportunity for fraud. The Lord General was of a character to invite such an appeal. Besides being a great soldier, he was a man of scholarly cultivation, of poetic imagination, of pure and upright life. Milton's admiration for Fairfax was staunch enough to survive the defection of the great and gentle patriot from the popular cause in 1649, when he drew back in horror from the plan of putting his king to death. As Milton appealed to Fairfax to free the secular power from corruption, so four years later

he exhorted Cromwell to save the spiritual kingdom from bondage. In addition to the old foes of the pure church, the Presbyterians, there had sprung up new foes in the shape of men who, though nominally Independents, desired to see ministers of the Gospel supported at the public expense. Of these Cromwell, doubtless from practical considerations of state, proved to be one. Milton represented the extreme radical wing of Independency, which not only held in abhorrence every interference of the secular power with the church, but declared that all ministers who accepted pay for their ministrations were "hireling wolves." This sonnet is Milton's cry to Cromwell to turn back into the true road. The exhortation was not heard; yet as had been the case before with Fairfax, Milton retained his admiration for his chief in the face of vital differences of thought.

The sonnet on young Henry Vane, unlike the foregoing two, was not prompted by any definite public crisis, but sprang from a train of thought similar to that which had led to the Cromwell sonnet. The young statesman who, at twenty-four, had been governor of Massachusetts, and had then and afterwards learned to know

"Both spiritual power and civil, what each

means,

What severs each,"

stood as a pillar of hope to the poet in these years when he was brooding jealously upon "the bounds of either sword."

The sonnet on the Piedmontese massacre disputes with the sonnet on his blindness the honor of first place among Milton's efforts in this form. No subject could have been more calculated to touch the innermost springs of passion in him. The Vaudois had cherished, long before Luther's time, presumably indeed from the earliest Christian centuries, a form of worship and a theology conceived in the purest spirit of the Reformation. Amid the intense religious ferment of the sixteenth and seven

teenth centuries they had stood as a type of the prisca fides of the early church, a survival of the golden age of apostolic faith. In January, 1655, the Duke of Savoy determined to suppress them. An edict was issued ordering the inhabitants of three valleys either to leave the country or to embrace the Catholic religion. On their refusal to comply, a general massacre was instituted, and carried out with frightful refinements of cruelty. The news filled Protestant Europe with horror. Behind the slow, measured denunciation of Milton's sonnet we can feel a mighty bulk of public wrath. In these wonderful lines the poet's art is at once at its soberest and at its intensest. Pattison has finely said of it: "It would not be easy to find a sonnet in any language of equal power to vibrate through all the fibres of feeling. Yet with what homely materials is the effect produced! Not only is there not a single purple patch in the wording, but of thought, or image, all that there is is a borrowed thought, and one repeatedly borrowed, namely, Tertullian's saying, 'The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church ;' yet we may say that with a familiar quotation for its only thought, and with diction almost below ordinary, its forceful flood of suppressed passion sweeps along the hackneyed biblical phrases of which it is composed, just as a swollen river rolls before it the worn pebbles long ago brought down from the mountain side. From this sonnet we may learn that the poetry of a poem is lodged somewhere else than in its matter or its thoughts or its imagery or its words. Our heart is here taken by storm, but not by any of these things. The poet hath breathed on us, and we have received his inspiration. In this sonnet is realized Wordsworth's definition of poetry, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.'"

Only one more group remains to be considered, the sonnets purely personal and autobiographic. Of these there are four,

"When the Assault was intended to the City," the two on his blindness, and one on his second wife. The first of these presents Milton in a characteristic and at the same time unexpected light. On the thirteenth of November, 1642, the king's forces had advanced from their victory at Edgehill to Turnham Green, on the outskirts of London. An immediate assault was expected, and Essex hastened out with regular forces and trainbands to the number of 24,000 to engage the enemy. The occasion was one of such imminent danger that Milton's atti2tude in staying quietly in his study to write

a sonnet pleading that his own house be spared from rapine by the cavalier troopers, seems rather chilly and ungenerous, not to say unvirile. The fact is, that he was at once unusually open to the enthusiasm of ideas, and unusually callous to the raw excitement of events. He had by nature much of the wanness of the idealist; it is, indeed, not difficult to believe that a con- ception of his failing in this respect, and the hope of overcoming it, biased his acceptance of public office when, a few years later, it was offered him. Now, with the brute force of arms drawing near, it was natural for him to retire haughtily into the kingdom of the mind, and especially to that city of the kingdom where his power was most absolute. The curious thing is that this haughtiness is tempered by an unexpected humility. The poet seems to bow his head before the conqueror, and to offer his music as the price of leniency, with a Greek submission to the Fates strangely at variance with his habitual temper.

The first sonnet on his blindness shows submission to fate in a larger sense and in a deeply Christian mood. His blindness had been total for three years, and he had not yet seen his way to using, in darkness, "that one talent which is death to hide." He seemed to have made the last and great sacrifice. The manner in which the human

pining of a strong man after the work denied him to do emerges here into contemplation of the sufficiency of the divine Worker, is so fine as to be beyond the reach of praise. The poet seems to stand by the battle chariot of God, powerless with wounds, but martial and attentive, while His aides and ensigns bear messages of the strife still waging. The second sonnet on his blindness, addressed to Cyriack Skinner, takes a more everyday view. It is pathetic to see Milton comforting himself in his calamity with the belief that his second pamphlet against Salmasius, with its scurrility, its personal abuse, and its poor logic, was worth the price of his eyes; and the touch of vanity in the opening lines only adds to the pathos. Yet the purely human courage which this second sonnet breathes, its refusal to “bate a jot of heart or hope," its determination to "still bear up and steer right onward," is almost as fine as the more exalted resignation of the first.

The last of Milton's sonnets, that on his dead wife, is the tenderest of all his utterances. He had married Katharine Woodcock on the 12th of November, 1656. Two years later she died in child-birth, and a month later her baby followed her. We know nothing of her or her relations with Milton beyond what the sonnet gives; but that is enough. The fact that he had never seen her face in life gives to this account of his veiled vision of her in sleep a peculiar poignancy; and the closing lines,

"But O! as to embrace me she inclined I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night,'

are in effect his farewell to the warmer human side of life. Henceforth his heart, too, was to dwell in darkness. The double darkness was given him as a background upon which to trace his vision of heaven and earth and hell in stupendous lines of light.

Hast gained thy entrance, Virgin wise and

pure.