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Updated: June 7, 2025
The unfortunate relations between Milton and his first wife are treated as we think all readers will say, at once with delicacy and justice. They are often expressed in language of great beauty: "The rapid purification of Milton's taste will be best perceived by comparing 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' of uncertain date but written after 1632 with the 'Ode on the Nativity, written 1629.
Paradise Lost, books 1-2, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and selected Sonnets, all in Standard English Classics; same poems, more or less complete, in various other series; Areopagitica and Treatise on Education, selections, in Manly's English Prose, or Areopagitica in Arber's English Reprints, Clarendon Press Series, Morley's Universal Library, etc. Minor Poets. Bunyan.
The attitude was reflective; the countenance exposed under the lifted visor of the helmet, was calm and benignant; except there was no suggestion of an evil revery holding the current of his thought, or casting a shade of uncertainty over his soul, he looked not unlike the famous Il Penseroso familiar to art-seekers in the Medici Chapel of Florence. Then the eyes of the rivals met.
A fourth brings before us the splendid phantoms of chivalrous romance, the trophied lists, the embroidered housings, the quaint devices, the haunted forests, the enchanted gardens, the achievements of enamoured knights, and the smiles of rescued princesses. In none of the works of Milton is his peculiar manner more happily displayed than in the Allegro and the Penseroso.
The Allegro and Penseroso Johnson described as 'two noble efforts of imagination. Of Lycidas he wrote: 'Surely no man could have fancied that he read it with pleasure, had he not known the author. Works, vii. 121, 2. Johnson's answer was, "I do not like to be officious; but if Mrs. Garrick will desire me to do it, I shall be very willing to pay that last tribute to the memory of a man I loved."
Milton couples his name with that of Orpheus in his "Il Penseroso": "But O, sad virgin, that thy power Might raise Musaeus from his bower, Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as warbled to the string, Drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek, And made Hell grant what love did seek."
If Busti's Lancinus Curtius be the portrait of a humanist, careworn with study, burdened by the laurel leaves that were so dry and dusty; if Gaston de Foix in the Brera, smiling at death and beautiful in the cropped bloom of youth, idealize the hero of romance; if Michael Angelo's Penseroso translate in marble the dark broodings of a despot's soul; if Della Porta's Julia Farnese be the Roman courtesan magnificently throned in nonchalance at a pope's footstool; if Verocchio's Colleoni on his horse at Venice impersonate the pomp and circumstance of scientific war surely this Medea exhales the flower-like graces, the sweet sanctities of human life, that even in that turbid age were found among high-bred Italian ladies.
There are the dirge notes in Lycidas; the sights, sounds, and odors of the country, in L'Allegro; the delights of "the studious cloister's pale," in Il Penseroso; the impelling presence of his "great Task-Master," in the sonnets. Although Milton is noted for his seriousness and sublimity, we must not be blind to the fact that his minor poems show great delicacy of touch.
When we hear the penseroso melody once more at the end, we may feel with the poet a state of resigned cheer. The real business of these harmonies is for incidental pranks, with an after-touch that confesses the jest, or softens it to a lyric utterance.
Do you remember that pretty little word-picture of a winter afternoon that you drew us something in the style of an Il Penseroso landscape? I expected to find you domesticated in a Berkshire farm-house." "Yes, I remember. I tried it. But I find it necessary, for my work, to be in New York. The newspapers confound 'em! won't move into the woods. But, after all, place is indifferent.
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