English Literature for Boys and Girls Part 50

At Cromwell's death he wrote:--

"Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehea.r.s.e; Singing of thee, inflame himself to fight And, with the name of Cromwell, armies fright."*

*Upon the Death of the Lord Protector.

But all Marvell's writings were not political, and one of his prettiest poems was written about a girl mourning for a lost pet.

"The wanton troopers riding by Have shot my fawn, and it will die.

Ungentle men! they cannot thrive who killed thee. Thou ne'er didst alive Them any harm: alas! nor could Thy death yet do them any good.

With sweetest milk and sugar, first I it at my own fingers nurs'd; And as it grew, so every day It wax'd more sweet and white than they.

It had so sweet a breath! And oft I blushed to see its foot so soft, And white (shall I say than my hand?) Nay, any lady's of the land.

It is a wondrous thing how fleet 'Twas on those little silver feet; With what a pretty skipping grace It oft would challenge me to race; And when 't had left me far away, 'Twould stay, and run again, and stay; For it was nimbler much than hinds, And trod as if on the four winds.

I have a garden of my own, But so with roses overgrown And lilies, that you would it guess To be a little wilderness; And all the spring-time of the year It only loved to be there.

Among the lilies, I Have sought it oft, where it should lie Yet could not, till itself would rise, Find it, although before mine eyes; For in the flaxen lilies' shade, It like a bank of lilies laid.

Upon the roses it would feed, Until its lips even seemed to bleed; And then to me 'twould boldly trip And plant those roses on my lip.

Now my sweet fawn in vanish'd to Whither the swans and turtles go; In fair Elysium to endure, With milk-white lambs and ermines pure, O do not run too fast: for I Will but bespeak thy grave, and die."

After the Restoration Marvell wrote satires, a kind of poem of which you had an early and mild example in the fable of the two mice by Surrey, a kind of poem of which we will soon hear much more. In these satires Marvell poured out all the wrath of a Puritan upon the evils of his day. Marvell's satires were so witty and so outspoken that once or twice he was in danger of punishment because of them. But once at least the King himself saved a book of his from being destroyed, for by every one "from the King down to the tradesman his books were read with great pleasure."* Yet he had many enemies, and when he died suddenly in August, 1678, many people though that he had been poisoned.

He was the last, we may say, of the seventeenth-century lyric poets.

*Burnet.

Besides the lyric writers there were many prose writers in the seventeenth century who are among the men to be remembered. But their books, although some day you will love them, would not interest you yet. They tell no story, they are long, they have not, like poetry, a lilt or rhythm to carry one on. It would be an effort to read them. If I tried to explain to you wherein the charm of them lies I fear the charm would fly, for it is impossible to imprison the sunbeam or find the foundations of the rainbow. It is better therefore to leave these books until the years to come in which it will be no effort to read them, but a joy.

Chapter LVII MILTON--SIGHT AND GROWTH

"THERE is but one Milton,"* there is, too, but one Shakespeare, yet John Milton, far more than William Shakespeare, stands a lonely figure in our literature. Shakespeare was a dramatist among dramatists. We can see how there were those who led up to him, and others again who led away from him. From each he differs in being greater, he outs.h.i.+nes them all. Shakespeare was a man among men. He loved and sinned with men, he was homely and kindly, and we can take him to our hearts. Milton both in his life and work was cold and lonely. He was a master without scholars, a leader without followers. Him we can admire, but cannot love with an understanding love. Yet although we love Shakespeare we can find throughout all his works hardly a line upon which we can place a finger and say here Shakespeare speaks of himself, here he shows what he himself thought and felt.

Shakespeare understood human nature so well that he could see through another's eyes and so forget himself. But over and over again in Milton's work we see himself. Over and over again we can say here Milton speaks of himself, here he shows us his own heart, his own pain. He is one of the most self-ful of all poets. He has none of the dramatic power of Shakespeare, he cannot look through another's eyes, so he sees things only from one standpoint and that his own. He stands far apart from us, and is almost inhumanly cold. That is the reason why so many of us find him hard to love.

*Professor Raleigh.

When, on a bleak December day in 1606, more than three hundred years ago, Milton was born, Elizabeth was dead, and James of Scotland sat upon the throne, but many of the great Elizabethans still lived. Shakespeare was still writing, still acting, although he had become a man of wealth and importance and the owner of New Place. Ben Jonson was at the very height of his fame, the favorite alike of Court and Commons. Bacon was just rising to power and greatness, his Novum Organum still to come.

Raleigh, in prison, was eating his heart out in the desire for freedom, trying to while away the dreary hours with chemical experiments, his great history not yet begun. Of the crowd of lyric writers some were boys at college, some but children in the nursery, and some still unborn. Yet in spite of the many writers who lived at or about the same time, Milton stands alone in our literature.

John Milton was the son of a London scrivener, that is, a kind of lawyer. He was well-to-do and a Puritan. Milton's home, however, must have been brighter than many a Puritan home, for his father loved music, and not only played well, but also composed. He taught his son to play too, and all through his life Milton loved music.

John was a pretty little boy with long golden brown hair, a fair face and dark gray eyes. But to many a strict Puritan, beauty was an abomination, and we are told that one of Milton's schoolmasters "was a Puritan in Ess.e.x who cut his hair short."

No doubt to him a boy with long hair was unseemly. John was the eldest and much beloved son of his father, who perhaps petted and spoiled him. He was clever as well as pretty, and already at the age of ten he was looked upon by his family as a poet. He was very studious, for besides going to St. Paul's School he had a private tutor. Even with that he was not satisfied, but studied alone far into the night. "When he went to schoole, when he was very young," we are told, "he studied hard and sate up very late: commonly till twelve or one at night. And his father ordered the mayde to sitt up for him. And in those years he composed many copies of verses, which might well become a riper age."* We can imagine to ourselves the silence of the house, when all the Puritan household had been long abed. We can picture the warm quiet room where sits the little fair-haired boy poring over his books by the light of flickering candles, while in the shadow a stern-faced white-capped Puritan woman waits. She sits very straight in her chair, her worn hands are folded, her eyes heavy with sleep. Sometimes she nods. Then with a start she shakes herself wide awake again, murmuring softly that it is no hour for any Christian body to be out o' bed, wondering that her master should allow so young a child to keep so long over his books.

Still she has her orders, so with a patient sigh she folds her hands again and waits. Thus early did Milton begin to shape his own course and to live a life apart from others.

*Aubrey.

At sixteen Milton went to Christ's College, Cambridge. And here he earned for himself the name of the Lady of Christ's, both because of his beautiful face and slender figure, and because he stood haughtily aloof from amus.e.m.e.nts which seemed to him coa.r.s.e or bad. In going to Cambridge, Milton had meant to study for the Church. But all through life he stood for liberty. "He thought that man was made only for rebellion," said a later writer.* As a child he had gone his own way, and as he grew older he found it harder and harder to agree with all that the Church taught--"till coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slaves, and take an oath withal. . . . I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." Thus was he, he says, "church-outed by the Prelates."* Milton could not, with a free conscience, become a clergyman, so having taken his degree he went home to his father, who now lived in the country at Horton. He left Cambridge without regrets. No thrill of pleasure seemed to have warmed his heart in after days when he looked back upon the young years spent beside the Cam.

*The Reason of Church Government, book II.

Milton went home to his father's house without any settled plan of life. He had not made up his mind what he was to be, he was only sure that he could not be a clergyman. His father was well off, but not wealthy. He had no great estates to manage, and he must have wished his eldest son to do and be something in the world, yet he did not urge it upon him. Milton himself, however, was not quite at rest, as his sonnet On his being arrived to the age of twenty-three shows:--

"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year: My hasting days fly on with full career, But my late Spring no bud or blossom show'th.

Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, That I to manhood am arriv'd so near, And inward ripeness doth much less appear, That some more timely happy spirits endu'th.

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean, or high, Toward which Time leads me; and the Will of Heaven; All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task-Master's eye."

Yet dissatisfied as he sometimes was, he was very sure of himself, and for five years he let his wings grow, as he himself said. But these years were not altogether lost, for if both day and night Milton roamed the meadows about his home in seeming idleness, he was drinking in all the beauty of earth and sky, flower and field, storing his memory with sights and sounds that were to be a treasure to him in after days. He studied hard, too, ranging at will through Greek and Latin literature. "No delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies," he says to a friend. And as the outcome of these five fallow years Milton has left us some of his most beautiful poems. They have not the stately grandeur of his later works, but they are natural and easy, and at times full of a joyousness which we never find in him again. And before we can admire his great poem which he wrote later, we may love the beauty of L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas, which he wrote now.

L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are two poems which picture two moods in which the poet looks at life. They are two moods which come to every one, the mirthful and the sad. L'Allegro pictures the happy mood. Here the man "who has, in his heart, cause for contentment" sings. And the poem fairly dances with delight of being as it follows the day from dawn till evening shadows fall.

It begins by bidding "loathed Melancholy" begone "'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy," and by bidding come "heart-easing Mirth."

"Haste, thee, nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful Jollity, Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods and becks, and wretched smiles.

Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides.

Come, and trip it as ye go On the light fantastic toe.

To hear the lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise."

These are a few lines from the opening of the poem which you must read for yourselves, for if I quoted all that is beautiful in it I should quote the whole.

Il Penseroso pictures the thoughtful mood, or mood of gentle Melancholy. Here Mirth is banished, "Hence fair deluding joys, the brood of Folly, and hail divinest Melancholy." The poem moves with more stately measure, "with even step, and musing gait," from evening through the moonlit night till morn. It ends with the poet's desire to live a peaceful studious life.

"But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale; And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars ma.s.sy proof, And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light.

There let the pealing organ blow To the full-voic'd choir below, In service high, and anthem clear, As may with sweetness through mine ear, Dissolve me into ecstacies, And bring all Heaven before mine eyes."

In Lycidas Milton mourns the death of a friend who was drowned while crossing the Irish Channel. He took the name from an Italian poem, which told of the sad death of another Lycidas.

The verse moves with even more stately measure than Il Penseroso.

"Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise, (That last infirmity of n.o.ble minds) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life."

It was during these early years spent at Horton, too, that Milton wrote his masque of Comus. It is strange to find a Puritan poet writing a masque, for Puritans looked darkly on all acting. It is strange to find that, in spite of the Puritan dislike to acting, the last and, perhaps, the best masque in our language should be written by a Puritan, and that not ten years before all the theaters in the land were closed by Puritan orders. But although, in many ways, Milton was sternly Puritan, these were only the better ways. He had no hatred of beauty, "G.o.d has instilled into me a vehement love of the beautiful," he says.

The masque of Comus was written for a great entertainment given by the Earl of Bridgewater, at Ludlow Castle, and three of his children took part in it. In a darksome wood, so the story runs, the enchanter, Comus, lived with his rabble rout, half brute, half man. For to all who pa.s.sed through the wood Comus offered a gla.s.s from which, if any drank, --

"Their human countenance, Th' express resemblance of the G.o.ds, is changed Into some brutish form of wolf, or bear, Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat, All other parts remaining as they were."

And they, forgetting their home and friends, henceforth live riotously with Comus.

Through this wood a Lady and her two brothers pa.s.s, and on the way the Lady is separated from her brothers and loses her way.

As she wanders about she is discovered by Comus who, disguising himself as a shepherd, offers her shelter in his "low but loyal cottage." The Lady, innocent and trusting, follows him. But instead of leading her to a cottage he leads her to his palace.

There the Lady is placed in an enchanted chair from which she cannot rise, and Comus tempts her to drink from his magic gla.s.s.

The Lady refuses, and with his magic wand Comus turns her to seeming stone.