Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/21

 HORTON PERIOD, 1632-1638 xiii

teen miles to the southwest of London ; here, amid rural sights and sounds, Milton was to spend the next five years, the happiest of his life.

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HORTON PERIOD, 1632-1638

IT was fortunate for the harmonious development of Milton's genius that during the critical years between youth and manhood, years which in most men's lives are fullest of turmoil and dubiety, he was enabled to live a life of quiet contempla- tion. His nature was fiercely polemical, and without this period of calm set be- tween his college life and his life as a public disputant, the sweeter saps of his mind would never have come to flower and fruitage. It was particularly fortunate, too, that this interim should be passed in the country, where the lyric influences were softest, where all that was pastoral and genial in his imagination was provoked. The special danger of men of his stamp, in whom will and doctrine are constantly president over impulse, is the loss of plasticity, the stiffening of imagination in its bonds. His " long holiday " at Horton left Milton free to capture in verse the ductile grace of youth, to have his leafy season. Afterward his work was to be less a sylvan growth, and more a monumental thing builded with hands.

The narratable facts of these five years are naturally few. Milton says himself that he " spent a long holiday turning over the Latin and Greek authors," and some volumes annotated by him have been preserved to show the wide range of reading indicated. The most notable additions to his treasury of thought were contributed by Euripides and Plato. He made occasional visits to London, for instruction in music and mathematics, to purchase books, to visit the theatres, and to call upon his married sister Anne Phillips or his younger brother Christopher, now entered as barrister at the Inner Temple. The facts of real significance, however, are the ones which cannot be chronicled, the drama which goes on in every sensitive life between the individual soul and the spirit of nature. The epi- sodes are nothing, a ramble by starlight along a piece of water, a nesting bird surprised in the hedge, a speaking light at dawn, but the results, when the one actor is young enough to meet the eternal youth of the other, are not to be mea- sured. In the beautiful Sonnet to the Nightingale we see the habitual seriousness of Milton's nature invaded by the tenderness and soft vague passion of spring in the country ; it has a troubadour grace and wistfulness discernible nowhere else among his utterances. More characteristically and with equal beauty, these new influences found expression in the twin poems IS Allegro and II Penseroso, named from the two typical moods of mind in which the poet confronts the pageantry of nature, the mood of joyous receptivity and the mood of sober contemplation. In the studied symmetry of these poems, their contrapuntal answering of part to part, as well as in the objective standpoint from which they are written, there is a self- eonsciousness alien to the born nature poet. Such a poet indeed Milton was not.

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