some incredibly short courtship.*

She is only

seven years the senior of the daughter Anne; but she seems to have been a sensible young person, not bookishly given, and looking after the household, while Anne and Mary and Deborah still wait, after a fashion, upon the student-wants of the poet. In fits of high abstraction he is now bringing the "Paradise" to a close not knowing, or not caring, maybe, for the little bickerings which rise and rage and die away in the one-sided home.

I cannot stay to characterize his great poem; nor is there need; immortal in more senses than one; humanity counts for little in it; one pair of human creatures only, and these looked at, as it were, through the big end of the telescope; with gigantic, Godlike figures around one, or colossal demons prone on fiery floods. It is not a child's book; to place it in schools as a parsing-book is an atrocity that I hope is ended. Not, I think, till we have had some fifty years to view the everlasting fight between good and evil in this world, can we see in

* This marriage took place on February 24, 1662-63, the age of the bride being twenty-five, and Milton in his fiftyfifth year.

proper perspective the vaster battle which, under Milton's imagination, was pictured in Paradise between the same foes. Years only can so widen one's horizon as to give room for the reverberations of that mighty combat of the powers of light and darkness.

We talk of the organ-music of Milton. The term has its special significance; it gives hint of that large quality which opens heavenly spaces with its billows of sound; which translates us; which gives us a lookout from supreme heights, and so lifts one to the level of his "Argument." There is large learning in his great poem — weighty and recondite; but this spoils no music; great, cumbrous names catch sonorous vibrations under his modulating touch, and colossal shields and spears clash together like cymbals. The whole burden of his knowledges - Pagan, Christian, or Hebraic, lift up and sink away upon the undulations of his sublime verse, as heavy-laden ships rise and fall upon some great ground-swell making in from outer seas.

A bookish color is pervading; if he does not steal flowers from books, he does what is better

he shows the fruit of them. There are stories of his debt to Cædmon, and still more authentic, of his debt to the Dutch poet Vondel,* and the old Provençal Bishop of Vienne, who as early as the beginning of the sixth century wrote on kindred themes. There is hardly room for doubt that Milton not only knew, but literally translated some of the old Bishop's fine Latin lines, and put to his larger usage some of his epithets.

Must we not admit that—in the light of such

*Vondel, b. 1587 (at Cologne); d. 1679. He was the author of many dramatic pieces, among which were "Jephtha," “Marie Stuart,” “Lucifer” (Luisevaar). Vondel also wrote "Adam in Exile," and "Samson, or Divine Vengeance." This latter, according to a writer in The Athenaum of November 7, 1885, has suspicious points of resemblance with "Samson Agonistes."

Other allied topics of interest are discussed in same journal's notice of George Edmundson's book on the Milton and Vondel question (Trübner & Co., London, 1885).

Vondel survived the production of his "Lucifer" by a quarter of a century, and died five years after Mil

ton.

Avitus was Bishop of Vienne (succeeding his father and grandfather) about 490. His poem, " De Initio Mundi,"

was in Latin hexameters. See interesting account" of same in The Atlantic Monthly for January, 1890.

developments - when the Puritan poet boasts of

discoursing on

"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,"

that it is due to a little lurking stimulant of that Original Sin which put bitterness into his Salmasian papers, and an ugly arrogance into his domestic discipline? But, after all, he was every way greater than his forerunners, and can afford to admit Cædmon and Vondel and Avitus, and all other claimants, as supporting columns in the underlying crypt upon which was builded the great temple of his song.

Last Days.

The home of Milton in these latter days of his life was often changed. Now, it was Holborn again; then Jewin Street; then Bunhill Row; and

one while for a year or more, when the great plague of 1665 desolated the city, he fled before it to the little village of Chalfont, some twenty miles distant from London on the Aylesbury road. There the cottage* may still be seen in which he

The cottage is a half-timber, gable fronted building, and has Milton's name inscribed over the door. The village

lived, and the garden in which he walked - but never saw. There, too, is the latticed window looking on the garden, at which he sat hour by hour, with the summer winds blowing on him from over honeysuckle beds, while he brooded, with sightless eyes turned to the sky, upon the mysteries of fate and foreknowledge.

A young Quaker, Ellwood, perhaps his dearest friend, comes to see him there, to read to him and to give a helping hand to the old man's study; his daughters, too, are at their helpful service; grateful, maybe, that even the desolation of the plague has given a short relief from the dingy house in the town and its treadmill labors, and put the joy of blooming flowers and of singing birds into their withered hearts.

The year after, which finds them in Bunhill Row again, brings that great London fire which the Monument now commemorates; they passing three days and nights upon the edge of that huge tem

is reached by a branch of the L. & N. W. R. R. American visitors will also look with interest at the burial place of William Penn, who lies in a "place of graves" behind the Friends' Meeting House -a mile and a half only from Chalfont Church.