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Updated: June 7, 2025
At Horton were composed, or inspired, Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus and others of his nominally minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this retirement the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had thrown himself away on politics or Canaanitish mythology. Peeping in upon his handsome young face in its golden setting of blonde curls,
Io is the moon, and Argus the starry sky, which, as it were, keeps sleepless watch over her. The fabulous wanderings of Io represent the continual revolutions of the moon, which also suggested to Milton the same idea. "To behold the wandering moon Riding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray In the heaven's wide, pathless way." Il Penseroso.
Not only did he address a sonnet to his memory, in which he declares that kings would wish to die, if by dying they could obtain such a monument in the hearts of men; but he also speaks of him in his Il Penseroso, as the tutelary genius of the English stage. Dryden, in fact, lived out the seventeenth century.
We might conceive an African type of woman so largely made and moulded, so much fuller in all the elements of life, physical and spiritual, that the dark hue of the skin should seem only to add an appropriate charm, as Milton says of his Penseroso, whom he imagines
It was probably a reminiscence of these vacations at Hauxwell that inspired the beautiful passage in his Milton, where he contrasts the frosty Ode to the Nativity with the Allegro and Penseroso. 'The two idylls, he says, 'breathe the free air of spring and summer and of the fields round Horton.
So he played horn-pipes and reels till all their hearts were on fire, and faces red, and eyes glittering, and legs aching, and he himself felt ready to burst out crying, and then he left off. As for il penseroso Pepper, he took this intrusion of merry music upon his sympathies very ill.
But if debarred by his limitations from a resounding or popular success, he will remain exceptionally dear to the heart of the recluse, who thinks that the scholar does well to cherish a grievance against the vulgar world beyond the cloister; and dearer still, perhaps, to a certain number of enthusiasts who began reading George Gissing as a college night-course; who closed Thyrza and Demos as dawn was breaking through the elms in some Oxford quadrangle, and who have pursued his work patiently ever since in a somewhat toilsome and broken ascent, secure always of suave writing and conscientious workmanship, of an individual prose cadence and a genuine vein of Penseroso:
Milton's poetry, especially his Il Penseroso, with its individual expression of melancholy, its studious spirit, "commercing with the skies and bringing all Heaven before the eyes," left a strong impress on the romantic spirit of the age. The subject matter of his Paradise Lost satisfied the romantic requirement for strangeness and strong feeling.
Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his splendid ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. At Horton he wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods.
Milton shows that there are as many charms in life to be found on the Penseroso side of it as there are on the Allegro." LADY GLENALVON. "Kenelm, you saved the life of my poor son, and when, later, he was taken from me, I felt as if he had commended you to my care.
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