Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/26

 xviii THE LIFE OF MILTON

The meeting probably occurred at the villa of Arcetri, near Florence, where the aged and blind astronomer was still held in partial confinement by the Inquisition. The painter who has given us the picture of Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters might have found here a subject in which truth need not have been sacrificed to picturesqueness. The meeting of these two great navigators of cosmic space, bound together by a common intrepidity and a common fate, exercises a legitimate spell over the imagination. It is open to question whether Milton ever accepted Galileo's cosmic theories as true ; certainly he did not see fit to admit the new astronomy into the scheme of Paradise Lost, except in the tentative form of a discussion of the theory between Adam and Raphael. But that he cherished the august memory of the blind philosopher, in his own days of blindness and defeat, is evidenced by the famous comparison of Satan's shield seen through the " Tuscan artist's optic glass," in Paradise Lost. Another reminiscence of this visit to Arcetri is the comparison of the fallen angels prostrate on the flood, to " autumnal leaves that strew the brook in Vallombrosa."

During February or April, 1639, Milton visited the ancestral home of the Dio- dati at Lucca. The hope of pleasing his bosom friend with an account of the place, which had prompted the visit, was not to be fulfilled. Diodati's death had already occurred. News of his bereavement reached Milton at Genoa, and con- spired with news of the increasing gravity of the political and" religious troubles in England to make his home-coming a solemn one. It is a severe loss to English literature that for the noble poem in which he enshrined the memory of his friend Milton chose the Latin instead of his native tongue. Diodati was much nearer to him than King had been ; the sincere grief which makes itself felt even across the conventionalized medium of the Epitaphium Damonis testifies that if the poet had waited for a like moment of power, and had then poured his emotion into his native idiom, this and not Lycidas might be held to-day as the greatest of English thren- odies. As it is the poem is an exquisite and touching work of art. Its interest is heightened by the autobiographic matter which it contains, especially concerning the projected epic dealing with the early history of Britain. We are informed that the epic is to be in English, the poet having reconciled himself, as Dante did, to the narrower but more susceptible audience thus afforded him ; we learn also that it is already begun.

IV

FROM MILTON'S RETURN TO ENGLAND TO THE LATIN SECRETARYSHIP,

1639-1649

EACH succeeding biographer of Milton shares Coleridge's feeling of bathos in the fact that after renouncing his cherished schemes of travel in order to be present at those portentous changes in English religion and politics of which he had pre- sentiment, he should have made haste on his return to London to burden himself with the petty duties of a schoolmaster. At first he had under his tutelage only

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