the power of language to express the most exalted emotions.

Moral energy, hatred of unrighteousness, unconquerable devotion to truth, resistless determination to put down oppression, uplifting of the whole soul to God-all these, apart from Scripture, have never been put into more soul-moving forms of expression than they have been by John Milton. The prayer which concludes the pamphlet on the Reformation has a majesty and a pathos, combined with a long-drawn fervor and a soaring splendor of phrase, which would befit one of the angels in the Apocalypse. I am bound, however, in all good conscience, to say that Milton's prose is noblest when it approaches most nearly to poetry. When he is most of a poet, then he is most of a man. It is hard for him, indeed, to keep the poet under-there is a smoldering fire that is ever ready to break forth; and when it does flame out we have a grandeur of expression such as has never been surpassed by any uninspired writer.

Alas that the poetic instinct could not always rule! Side by side with these bursts of eloquence, or, rather, surrounding them, interpenetrating them, and sometimes swamping them, we have great tracts of sonorous and learned, but involved and entangled, speech, in which simplicity is lost sight of, and bitterness of partisanship seems quite ready to make the worse appear the better reason. Here is the narrowness, as well as the sternness, of the Puritan.

With all his knowledge of literature and of art, Milton was from his youth something of a recluse. The broadening and humanizing process ended with his departure from Italy. Henceforth for twenty years he

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threw himself into the conflict of opinions with an uncompromising rancor which sometimes makes even truth and righteousness seem unlovely. The close of that very prayer which pictures the redeemed as "clasping inseparable hands, with joy and bliss in overmeasure forever," exults over the fallen foes of liberty, and predicts that, "after a shameful end in this life," they "shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and deepest gulf of hell," where they shall remain forever, "the basest and lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downtrodden, vassals of perdition.

Here is a fierceness of denunciation which reminds us of Sumner's assaults upon slavery. There have been days in our own national history when even Quakers found great satisfaction in reading the imprecatory psalms. We cannot understand the fulminations of Milton, until in imagination we put ourselves back into the times of the Long Parliament. Milton's prose is full of imprecations upon the enemies of liberty because they are regarded as the enemies of God. His pam

phlets breathe a spirit of lofty justice, and they appeal to the conscience of mankind. There was in them, to use Shakespeare's phrase, "a proud, majestical, high scorn," which served an excellent purpose in combating aristocratic pretence and royal prerogative.

Their influence in the crisis of the struggle for freedom in England was only second to the influence of the sword of Cromwell. The essay entitled "The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates," printed in February, 1648– 49, immediately after the execution of King Charles, and "proving that it is lawful and hath been held so through all ages, for any, who have the power, to call to

account a tyrant or wicked king, and after due conviction to depose and put him to death," is so scathing an indictment of the dead "traitor, murderer, and public enemy," and so tremendous a justification of that act of State by which he was condemned to death, that it will forever stand in human history as the unanswerable plea of the Regicides. That it did its work is plain, when we remember that in 1663, Twyn, a bookseller, was hanged, drawn, and quartered, for printing a book which merely reproduced the substance of Milton's argument. It is one of the yet unexplained mysteries of the time that Milton himself, when so many friends of liberty perished, was not called to anwer with his life.

The "Areopagitica" is the noblest of all defenses of an unfettered press. Milton says:

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a progeny of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. . . As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. . . We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed; sometimes a martyrdom; and, if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre; whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life.

Yet this masterly "Speech for the Liberty of Un

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licensed Printing" would never have seen the light, if Milton had not felt called upon to defend his own previous conduct. On August 1, 1643, he had printed without a license, because no license could ever have been obtained, a tract entitled "The Doctrine and Dis cipline of Divorce." In it he had argued that "indis. position, unfitness, and contrariety of mind are proper causes of divorce," and that proper laws on this subject should be included in the new Reformation in England. The modern world knows well, and Milton's enemies did not delay to point out then, that his views had been in great part determined by his hasty and infelicitous marriage.

Until his thirty-fifth year, this lofty idealist, with his soaring imagination and his devotion to books, had dwelt, as Wordsworth phrases it, "like a star, apart." But when he visited Richard Powell, at Forest Hill, in Oxfordshire, to collect five hundred pounds which that gentleman had long owed his father, the star came strangely down from its heavenly heights, and entangled itself in the golden curls of Mary Powell, the daughter of his host. It was clearly a case of love at first sight, at least on Milton's part, and he afterward sorrowfully confessed that love, though not blind, has but one eye, and that eye is often deceived. He seems to have clothed the pretty creature that attracted him with a whole array of graces and virtues drawn solely from the wardrobe of his fancy. Because she smiled, he thought her appreciative; because she was silent, he thought her wise.

In less than a month after their first meeting, Milton, instead of his five hundred pounds, took Mary Powell

back to London with him, as his wife. There, instead of the fresh air and the flowers of the country, she had the smoky city, and rooms that overlooked a churchyard. After the first feasting, life came to be ineffably dull. Milton was much with his books, and the young bride began to sigh for the gayety of her home. Milton was as handsome as a statue, but, alas! he seemed almost as stiff and cold. Unless you are a Pygmalion, you cannot love a statue, and Mary Powell Milton was no Pygmalion. Nor did her husband find her the wise and appreciative wife he had expected her to be. Sad to say, he found her stupid, instead. In his subsequent pamphlets he cites, as a proper cause for divorce, “inability for fit and matchable conversation." He talks of "a mute and spiritless mate"; "a living soul bound to a dead corpse." He declares that it is "enough to abase the mettle of a generous spirit, and sink him to a low and vulgar pitch of endeavor in all his actions"; enough to drive a man "at last, through murmuring and despair, to thoughts of atheism."

The husband, in this case, it must be acknowledged, was of too lofty and severe a nature to be fitted for matrimony. Rigid self-discipline had prepared him for autocracy in the household. He had ideas with regard to the subjection of women which belonged to pagan and classic, rather than to Christian times. It is quite possible that he undertook to command, when he should have ruled by love. The verses in "Samson Agonistes," where the athlete laments his failure to resist Delilah, seem a reminiscence of this experience of Milton's, though they intimate no consciousness on his part of wrong: