only; before coaches and macadamised roads; while the Colne, which
flows through the village, was still a river, and not the kennel of a
paper-mill. There was no lack of water and woods meadow and pasture,
closes and open field, with the regal towers of Windsor--"bosom'd high
in tufted trees," to crown the landscape. Unbroken leisure, solitude,
tranquillity of mind, surrounded by the thickets and woods, which
Pliny thought indispensable to poetical meditation (Epist.9.10), no
poet's career was ever commenced under more favourable auspices. The
youth of Milton stands in strong contrast with the misery, turmoil,
chance medley, struggle with poverty, or abandonment to dissipation,
which blighted the early years of so many of our men of letters.

Milton's life is a drama in three acts. The first discovers him in
the calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which _L'Allegro_, _Il
Penseroso_, and _Lycidas_ are the expression. In the second act he
is breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of party passion and
religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the
battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems,
_Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_, are the
utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur,
when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness,
temperance, and judgment to come, alone before a fallen world.

In this delicious retirement of Horton, in alternate communing with
nature and with books, for five years of persevering study he laid in
a stock, not of learning, but of what is far above learning, of wide
and accurate knowledge. Of the man whose profession is learning, it
is characteristic that knowledge is its own end, and research its own
reward. To Milton all knowledge, all life, virtue itself, was already
only a means to a further end. He will know only "that which is of use