398 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2-4 S. IX. May 26. '60. 



How much of unrecorded wisdom, how many 

 sallies of playful wit, must have brightened this 

 humble fireside, when, during that winter of 

 1665-6, some chosen friend was present as a 

 guest to 



" Help waste a sullen day, what may be won 

 From the hard season gaining." * 



For Milton was much visited by his learned con- 

 temporaries, and was himself eminently a good 

 converser. " He was delightful company," said 

 his favourite daughter, " and was the life of the 

 conversation." Here Henry Laurence may have 

 held high converse with the blind bard on " our 

 Communion and war with Angels," a subject of 

 mysterious speculation congenial to both of them. 

 Here we know that there came a humbler visi- 

 tor, but one to whose casual suggestion the world 

 is indebted for one of its noblest literary posses- 

 sions. For in this room was planned, in this 

 cottage was begun, and in all probability com- 

 pleted, the poem of " Paradise Regained." The 

 occurrence is thus related by Milton's young 

 friend and neighbour, Ellwood, who had called 

 here to pay the first, visit of welcome to the poet 

 in his new abode : " After some common dis- 

 courses had passed between us, he called for a 

 MS. of his, which he bade me take home with me 

 and read at my leisure." Honest Ellwood, on 

 returning the MS. at his next visit, " pleasantly 

 said, ' Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, 

 but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?' 

 He made me no answer, but sat some time in a 

 muse, and then broke off the discourse." On a 

 subsequent visit, soon after the poet's return to 

 London, Milton showed him Paradise Regained, 

 and " in a pleasant tone said, ' This is owing to 

 you, for you put it into my head by the question 

 you put to me at Chalfont.' " 



The author of a meritorious little book upon 

 Milton's Early Reading, who came here from 

 Bath many years ago, remarked that there was 

 "no prospect from the windows." But, good Mr. 

 Dunster, what is a prospect to a blind man's eye ? 

 And there were prospects within the room that 

 would have dazzled the eyes of the cleverest of 

 the poet's commentators. My blindness, says Mil- 

 ton in a magnificent passage in his Second De- 

 fence, " keeps from my view only the coloured 

 surfaces of things, while it leaves me at liberty to 

 contemplate the beauty and stability of virtue 

 and of truth. How many things are there be- 

 sides which I would not -willingly see ; how many 



* Sonnet xx. Much criticism has been expended of 

 late upon translations of the Odes of Horace, which are 

 after all untranslatable. Were I asked to name any poem 

 that would give an English reader the best idea of Ho- 

 race's manner in his less ambitious and more genial 

 mood, I would from amongst Milton's social sonnets 

 venture to select this one, and, as especially character- 

 istic, the quiet turn in the closing lines. 



which I must see against my will ; and how few 

 which I feel any anxiety to see ! There is, as the 

 Apostle has remarked, a way to strength through 

 weakness. Let me then be the most feeble crea- 

 ture alive, as long as that feebleness serves to in- 

 vigorate the energies of my rational and immortal 

 spirit ; as long as in that obscurity in which I am 

 enveloped, the light of the Divine presence more 

 clearly shines!" 



Think of the marvellous visions that must have 

 passed before the " inward eye " of the blind old 

 man who sat in the chimney-nook of this mean 

 chamber ! The banquet scene in the 2nd book of 

 the Paradise Regained, " He spake no dream," 

 &c. ; the night-storm in the 4th, and then the ex- 

 quisite description of morning that follows, where 

 the secret of its magical effect upon the reader 

 arises from what the painter would call its repose 

 — from the force of contrast between the calm 

 and quietude of the " sweet return of morn " and 

 the hurricane and demoniacal glamour of the 

 night preceding in the desert. I know of no other 

 instance where the agency of this feeling of re- 

 pose is employed with a finer effect, except one, 

 which it would perhaps hardly comport with the 

 reverence due to divine revelation to regard from 

 merely a literary point of view ; I refer to the 

 passage in S. Luke's Gospel which follows the 

 awful narrative of our Lord's crucifixion. After 

 the hideous tumult of the city, — the " great com- 

 pany of people;" the ''loud voices" of the mock- 

 ing priests ; the wailing women ; together with 

 the earthquake, the eclipse, and the rending of 

 the veil of the Temple, — prodigies which ac- 

 companied the consummation of the " unknown 

 agonies " of the Cross ; after all this occurs a pas- 

 sage which has always struck me as inexpressibly 

 soothing : one seems almost to feel the hush and 

 pathetic stillness of the early morning, when to 

 the two disciples on their way to Emmnus, "Jesus 

 himself drew near and said unto them, What man- 

 ner of communications are these that ye have one 

 to another, as ye ivalk and are sad?" 



And now, in closing this paper, I trust I may 

 be forgiven for the avowal that I am so far a lite- 

 rary heretic as almost to prefer the Paradise Re- 

 gained to its great precursor. I am not speaking 

 critically, although, perhaps, something might be 

 said that way, — but I mean as far as my own indi- 

 vidual feelings are concerned. I think that there 

 is more moral wisdom, more richness of thought, 

 and far more pregnant brevity of expression in 

 the later poem ; less of sublimity, but certainly 

 no failure of strength in the song of the divine old 

 man, who at its commencement invoked heavenly 

 assistance to bear him 



". . . . through height or depth of nature's bounds 

 With prosperous wing full summ'd, to tell of deeds 

 Above heroic." 



W. L. Nichols. 



