Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/37

 COMPLETION OF PARADISE LOST xxix

fields, where she lived in obscure widowhood. Some pictures of her father were ehown her, to get her opinion of their authenticity. Several she passed by, saying " No, no," to the question whether she had ever seen such a face ; but when a cer- tain picture in crayons was produced, she cried out in transport, " 'T is my father, 't is my dear father ; I see him, 't is him ! " and then she put her hands to several parts of the face, crying, " 'T is the very man ! here, here ! " In all her reminis- cences of her father there was, her visitors report, the same tone of reverence and fondness.

Besides the robust and cheery figure of Andrew Marvell, a faithful visitor, there came to break the gloom of the Milton household a young Quaker, Thomas Ell- wood. He was the son of a small country squire, and possessed of all the simplicity and heartiness proper to the character. He had embraced the Quaker faith by con- tagion from the enthusiasm of a family of Penningtons whom he visited, and along with his new faith felt a desire to grow in the wisdom of books. To that end, he was introduced to Milton, took a house in the neighborhood, and came every day full of joyous zeal to imbibe learning from the works which the great man set him to read aloud. Whether poor Ellwood gathered much intellectual sustenance from this haphazard diet or not, his presence must have been a wholesome and inspirit- ing one to the solitary scholar. From him and Phillips we get some interesting hints concerning Milton's habits of composition. " Leaning back obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it," he would dictate ten, twenty, thirty lines at a sitting. Sometimes he would " lie awake all night, striving, but unable to make a single line." Then again, when the mood was on him, the verse would come " with a certain impetus and aestro as himself seemed to believe," and he would call his daughter Mary out of bed to take the words from his lips. His own statement is recorded, too, that " his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinoctial to the vernal, and that whatever he attempted (in the other part of the year) was never to his satisfaction, though he courted his fancy never so much."

How far Paradise Lost had progressed by the time of Milton's instalment in the house in Jewin Street, whither he removed from his temporary lodgings in Hoi- born, is only matter of conjecture. At the beginning of the third book the move- ment of the poem is interrupted by a splendid " hymn to light " which may mark the resumption of the task after interruption caused by the King's return. A simi- lar break occurs at the beginning of Book VII, and references in this passage to the " evil days and evil tongues " upon which the poet has fallen, as well as to post- restoration literature and manners, the " barbarous dissonance of Bacchus and his revellers," point to this as more probably marking the time of resumption. The probability is increased by the fact that the next distinct break in the narrative, at the beginning of Book IX, would then correspond to the last serious interrup- tion which the work could have suffered, that occasioned by Milton's third mar- riage, this time to Elizabeth Minshull, a handsome young woman of twenty-six, and his removal to a new house in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields. It was certainly fin-

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