Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/112

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��POEMS DURING CIVIL WAR AND PROTECTORATE

��the least successful of the whole series. The personification of the lady's good deeds, azure -winged and purple -clad, guided by Faith and Love to Heaven, there to intercede for the soul of their mistress, is marked by the conceitfulness which was the bane of Milton's early manner. It is the only one of the sonnets which lacks the accent of simple conviction. Some interest attaches to it, however, in that it presents another aspect of the Puritan conception of woman, as she reveals herself in a life of active charity.

A more sincere eulogy of Christian womanhood appears in the sonnet "To a Virtuous Young Lady." It has been plau- sibly conjectured that the person addressed was that Miss Davis whom Milton appears to have had some intention of marrying, in practical exemplification of the free doc- trines proclaimed in his divorce tracts. Whether this be true or not, the sonnet is very tender and exalted. The closing pic- ture of the wise virgin, waiting, her odorous lamp filled with " deeds of light," to find entrance ..." when the Bridegroom with his feastful

friends Passes to bliss at the mid-hour of night,"

seems breathed upon by the very breath of passion; but whether passion for the wo- man or for the thing she typifies it is hard to say. In his youth, all the warm and gorgeous imagery which clusters about the Hebraic idea of paradisaic love had had a strong attraction for Milton, a stronger attraction than it has had for any other English poet except Crashaw. In Lycidas and in the Epitaphium Damonis he had appropriated the idea with startling com- pleteness. This sonnet is the latest expres- sion of this mystical strain in his nature; for in Paradise Lost the idea, though put forward with emphasis, has become some- what intellectualized and pallid. In losing it, he lost one of those vital conceptions, at once sensuous and spiritual, which take hold of all the fibres of a poet's nature,

��which may, indeed, be called the poet's peculiar dower.

The other sonnets addressed to intimate friends are three in number. Two of them, the sonnet to Mr. Lawrence and the first to Cyriack Skinner, seem to be nothing more nor less than " poetical invitations to din- ner," in the manner suggested by Horace's "Quid bellicosus Cantaber." Both Law- rence and Skinner were frequent visitors at Milton's house in Petty France. Law- rence was the son of the President of Cromwell's Council, and about twenty years old at the earliest date, 1656, which can be assigned to the sonnet. Skinner, grandson of the famous jurist Sir Edward Coke, was a young barrister, a member of the famous republican debating club called the " Rota," which held its meetings at the Turk's Head in Palace Yard. The sonnets mark that bright spot in the poet's adult life which followed upon his second mar- riage. They offer an unusual combination of gravity and grace in the treatment of a trivial subject. Pattison says of them, "In these two sonnets he has shown that he could lay his hand gently on the strings, and take it off again. Milton's, indeed, is not the delicate touch of Desaugiers or Be"ranger, those masters of ' la chose legere ; ' but what is wanted in suppleness is made up by dignity and religious resignedness of which the libertine song writer is inca- pable."

The last sonnet of this group, that to Henry Lawes, has a higher interest, ex- trinsic and intrinsic. Milton's friendship with Lawes, beginning possibly in the poet's boyhood, at the house in Bread Street, strengthened by his growing taste for music and by their collaboration in the Arcades and Comus, must have been one of the most genial influences in the poet's life. The sonnet in question, though it first appeared in print prefixed to a col- lection of Choice Psalms, published by Lawes and his brother in 1648, had been written two years before, probably in the period of

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