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The last part of Milton's life is a picture of solitary grandeur unequaled in literary history. With the Restoration all his labors and sacrifices for humanity were apparently wasted. From his retirement he could hear the bells and the shouts that welcomed back a vicious monarch, whose first act was to set his foot upon his people's neck.
In Milton, the poet arose who was supremely adequate to the greatest task laid on epic poetry since its beginning with Homer; Milton's task was perhaps even more exacting than that original one. "His work is not the greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first." The epigram might just as reasonably have been the other way round.
No, not to the writer, but to the soul whose progeny the book is, to the living intellect that bred it, in Milton's noble phrase, to "an Immortality rather than a life." "Many a man," he says, "lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
Milton's own mind was cast in a sublime mold. This quality of mind is evident even in his figures of rhetoric. The Milky Way appears to him as the royal highway to heaven: "A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, And pavement stars." When Death and Satan meet, Milton wishes the horror of the scene to manifest something of the sublime.
Now to the English reader of the seventeenth century and the same holds good to this day there were only two cycles of persons and events sufficiently known beforehand to admit of being assumed by a poet. He must go either to the Bible, or to the annals of England. Thus far Milton's choice of subject was limited by the consideration of the public for whom he wrote.
"Don't fail to realize that you're still alive, Jonas." "I'm going to bathe Mr. Milton's face for him," said Na-che, with a fine air of indifference. "I can set a broken leg, too." "It's set," said Agnew and Enoch together, "but," added Enoch, "that isn't saying that Milton mustn't be gotten to a doctor with all speed." Diana nodded. "Where are Mr. Forrester and Mr. Harden?" she asked.
The subject matter can be best given in Milton's own lines at the beginning of the poem: "Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, Sing, Heavenly Muse..."
Two other well-known poems of this second period are the Pindaric odes, "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard." The first is strongly suggestive of Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," but shows Milton's influence in a greater melody and variety of expression. "The Bard" is, in every way, more romantic and original.
Young enjoys the credit of what is called an "Extempore Epigram on Voltaire," who, when he was in England, ridiculed, in the company of the jealous English poet, Milton's allegory of "Sin and Death:" "You are so witty, profligate and thin, At once we think thee Milton, Death, and Sin." "No stranger, sir, though born in foreign climes.
"In striking a balance between these two accounts, we discover a difference in favor of the co-operative system, with its magical insurance, which is wider, deeper and more startling than the difference between the illustrations of Dante's Inferno, and the descriptions of Milton's paradise! "A careful study of this insurance question, has taught our people many valuable lessons.
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