Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/29

 MILTON'S RETURN TO ENGLAND xxi

put forth. Marriage as an ideal institution, " the unexpressive nuptial song," has rarely been more nobly conceived than in these pages, and the pleading against violations of the spirit by the letter of wedlock rises at times to passionate poetry. There are few English sentences as full of virile tenderness as that in which Milton says, " Then " (in case his tract is listened to) " I doubt not with one gentle strok- ing to wipe away ten thousand tears out of the life of men." The second edition, published after his wife's refusal to return, according to her word, at Michaelmas of 1643, is strengthened with formal arguments and addressed boldly to the Parlia- ment. The Tract was publicly denounced by Mr. Herbert Palmer in a sermon before the Houses of Parliament, a sermon which had the more weight because of the excitement then reigning in that body over the general growth of " heresy and schism," of which Milton's pamphlet was held to be one of the blackest examples. One of the most signal, at least, it certainly was, indicative of that terrible spirit of question which was abroad in the land, to make a modern England out of the England of the Stuarts. The Areopagitica, or speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing, the pamphlet of Milton's which has alone held an audience to our day, followed as another startling manifesto of his radical thought. Broadly viewed, it is a plea for universal toleration of opinion, exactly what distracted England most needed, if she could only have known it.

In the last but one of his four pamphlets on divorce, Tetrachordon, Milton gave hint of his intention to marry again, in the significant words, " If the Law make not a timely provision, let the Law, as reason is, bear the censure of the conse- quences." He even went so far, according to Phillips, as to select Mary Powell's successor, a Miss Davis, to whom in all likelihood the sonnet To a Virtuous Young Lady was addressed. Frightened by rumors of this match, and further induced by the increasingly desperate condition of the Cavalier cause, the Powells made overtures for a reconciliation. Milton was brought, without warning, face to face with his truant bride at the home of his kinsman, Mr. Blackborough, in St. Mar- tin's le Grand Lane. The passage in Samson Agonistes in which the blind captive repulses his " hyena " wife, and that in Paradise Lost where Adam raises up and comforts remorseful Eve, have been often pointed out as having a probable auto- biographic bearing on this episode. Whether from repentance or a broken spirit, the girl-wife seems to have lived the remaining years of her short life meekly enough. During the seven years until her death, in 1652, she bore Milton three daughters and a son, the son dying in infancy, the daughters surviving to be their father's trial and reproach. Measured against her mute acceptance of the situa- tion, there is something unpleasantly saturnine in the two sonnets with which Mil- ton took leave of the divorce subject. The first of these, on TetracJwrdon, is the only instance in which he deigned to degrade poetry into doggerel ; for the first and last time, in verse, he threw aside his lyre of song and grasped the bastinado of contemporary satire a fact which at least testifies eloquently to the harassed condition of his mind.

During the lull in politics following the defeat of the King at Naseby, in July,

�� �