PARADISE LOST. BK. XII. Painting by S. Meteyard.
"They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
ThroughEden took their solitary way."
(Paradise Lost. Bk. XII.)
A DAY WITH JOHN MILTON
BY MAY BYRON
HODDER & STOUGHTON
In the same Series.
Tennyson.
Browning.
E. B. Browning.
Burns.
Byron.
Longfellow.
Whittier.
Rossetti.
Shelley.
Scott.
Coleridge.
Morris.
Wordsworth.
Whitman.
Keats.
Shakespeare
A DAY WITH JOHN MILTON
bout four o'clock on a September morning of 1665,—when the sunwas not yet shining upon his windows facing the Artillery Fields, andthe autumnal dew lay wet upon his garden leaves,—John Milton awoke withhis customary punctuality, and, true to his austere and abstemious modeof life, wasted no time over comfortable indolence. He rose andproceeded to dress, with the help of his manservant Greene. For,although he was but fifty-four years in age, his hands were partlycrippled with gout and chalkstones, and his eyes, clear, bright andblue as they had always been to outward seeming, were both stone-blind.
Milton still retained much of that personal comeliness whichhad won him, at Cambridge, the nickname of "Lady of Christ's College." Hisoriginal red and white had now become a uniform pallor; his thick,light brown hair, parted at the top, and curling richly on hisshoulders—(no close-cropt Roundhead this!)—was beginning to fadetowards grey. But his features were noble and symmetrical; he waswell-built and well-proportioned; and he was justified in pridinghimself upon a personal appearance which he had never neglected ordespised. In his own words, he was "neither large nor small: at no timehad he been considered ugly; and in youth, with a sword by his side, hehad never feared the bravest."
Such was the man who now, neatly dressed in black, was led into his study,upon the same floor as his bedroom,—a small chamber hung with rustygreen,—and there, seated in a large old elbow-