JOHN MILTON 43 
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 Taskmaster’s eye.” 
One is reminded by this of Goethe’s simile of the star 
which, without hasting but without resting, fulfils the 
destiny assigned it. The spirit is that of the old monk- 
ish injunction, to study as if for life eternal but to live 
prepared to die to-morrow, the very spirit of consecra- 
tion to a lofty purpose." That Milton at the age of 
twenty-three should have felt any lack of inward ripe- 
ness seems odd when we know that his scholarship 
was already generally recognized as greater than had 
ever been seen at Cambridge, save perhaps when Eras- 
mus was teaching Greek there. When Milton took 
his master’s degree the next year he was urged to stay 
and accept a fellowship. But at that time it was neces- 
sary for the fellow of a college to be in holy orders, 
and although Milton’s parents had meant that he 
should be a clergyman, he had by this time discovered 
that he required more liberty of thought and speech 
than could be found in the Church. In his own forcible 
words, “ I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence 
before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun 
with servitude and forswearing.” So he left Cam- 
bridge and went home. For a moment he thought of 
taking law as a profession, but it was clear that such 
a course would tend to defeat his cherished purpose of 
writing a great poem, and the idea was abandoned. 
1“ Disce ut semper victurus vive, ut cras moriturus,” of which he has 
given so admirable a translation, became the motto of Dr. Fiske’s life, and 
was graven above the hearth in his library at “ Westgate,” in Cambridge. 
