Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/597

] So he waited, fighting the battles of his country side by side with Cromwell and Hampden, Pym and Marvel; and when at length he found leisure to achieve his last great triumph, he was left alone in the field. He had outlived the great battle of king and people, in which extraordinary men and as extraordinary events had arisen, and shaken the whole civilised world. Charles I., Laud, and Strafford had fallen in their blood; the monarchy and the church had fallen; Pym, Hampden, Marvel, Vane, and the dictator Cromwell, had not only pulled down the greatest throne in Europe, but had made all others seem to reel by the terrific precedent. All these stern agents, with the generals Ireton, Harrison, Lambert, Fleetwood, and their compeers, who had risen from the people to fight for the people, were gone like the actors in an awful tragedy who had played their rôle. Some had perished in their blood, others had been torn from their graves; the monarchy and the church, the peerage, and all the old practices and maxims were again in the ascendant, and had taken bloody vengeance; yet this one man—he who had incited and applauded, who had defended and made glorious through his mighty talents, his unrivalled eloquence, and unapproachable learning, the whole republican cause—was left untouched. Blind, poor, and old, as if some special guardianship of Providence had shielded him, or as if the very foes who had dragged the dreaded Cromwell from his grave feared the imprecations of posterity, and shrunk from the touch of that sacred head,—there sat the sublime old man at his door, feeling, with grateful enjoyment, the genial sunshine falling upon him, making of his very darkness immortal harvest.

John Milton. From an authentic Picture.

Thee I revisit safe.

And feed thy sov'reign, vital lamp; but thou

Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain

To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;

So thick a drop serene hath quench'd their orbs.

Or dim suffusion veil'd. Yet not the more

Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt

Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,

Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief

Thee, Sion, and the flow'ry brooks beneath,

That wash thy hallow'd feet, and warbling flow,

Nightly I visit: nor sometimes forget

Those other two equall'd with me in fate,