Part 50 (1/2)

At Cromwell's death he wrote:--

”Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehea.r.s.e; Singing of thee, inflame himself to fight And, with the name of Cromwell, armies fright.”*

*Upon the Death of the Lord Protector.

But all Marvell's writings were not political, and one of his prettiest poems was written about a girl mourning for a lost pet.

”The wanton troopers riding by Have shot my fawn, and it will die.

Ungentle men! they cannot thrive who killed thee. Thou ne'er didst alive Them any harm: alas! nor could Thy death yet do them any good.

With sweetest milk and sugar, first I it at my own fingers nurs'd; And as it grew, so every day It wax'd more sweet and white than they.

It had so sweet a breath! And oft I blushed to see its foot so soft, And white (shall I say than my hand?) Nay, any lady's of the land.

It is a wondrous thing how fleet 'Twas on those little silver feet; With what a pretty skipping grace It oft would challenge me to race; And when 't had left me far away, 'Twould stay, and run again, and stay; For it was nimbler much than hinds, And trod as if on the four winds.

I have a garden of my own, But so with roses overgrown And lilies, that you would it guess To be a little wilderness; And all the spring-time of the year It only loved to be there.

Among the lilies, I Have sought it oft, where it should lie Yet could not, till itself would rise, Find it, although before mine eyes; For in the flaxen lilies' shade, It like a bank of lilies laid.

Upon the roses it would feed, Until its lips even seemed to bleed; And then to me 'twould boldly trip And plant those roses on my lip.

Now my sweet fawn in vanish'd to Whither the swans and turtles go; In fair Elysium to endure, With milk-white lambs and ermines pure, O do not run too fast: for I Will but bespeak thy grave, and die.”

After the Restoration Marvell wrote satires, a kind of poem of which you had an early and mild example in the fable of the two mice by Surrey, a kind of poem of which we will soon hear much more. In these satires Marvell poured out all the wrath of a Puritan upon the evils of his day. Marvell's satires were so witty and so outspoken that once or twice he was in danger of punishment because of them. But once at least the King himself saved a book of his from being destroyed, for by every one ”from the King down to the tradesman his books were read with great pleasure.”* Yet he had many enemies, and when he died suddenly in August, 1678, many people though that he had been poisoned.

He was the last, we may say, of the seventeenth-century lyric poets.

*Burnet.

Besides the lyric writers there were many prose writers in the seventeenth century who are among the men to be remembered. But their books, although some day you will love them, would not interest you yet. They tell no story, they are long, they have not, like poetry, a lilt or rhythm to carry one on. It would be an effort to read them. If I tried to explain to you wherein the charm of them lies I fear the charm would fly, for it is impossible to imprison the sunbeam or find the foundations of the rainbow. It is better therefore to leave these books until the years to come in which it will be no effort to read them, but a joy.

Chapter LVII MILTON--SIGHT AND GROWTH

”THERE is but one Milton,”* there is, too, but one Shakespeare, yet John Milton, far more than William Shakespeare, stands a lonely figure in our literature. Shakespeare was a dramatist among dramatists. We can see how there were those who led up to him, and others again who led away from him. From each he differs in being greater, he outs.h.i.+nes them all. Shakespeare was a man among men. He loved and sinned with men, he was homely and kindly, and we can take him to our hearts. Milton both in his life and work was cold and lonely. He was a master without scholars, a leader without followers. Him we can admire, but cannot love with an understanding love. Yet although we love Shakespeare we can find throughout all his works hardly a line upon which we can place a finger and say here Shakespeare speaks of himself, here he shows what he himself thought and felt.

Shakespeare understood human nature so well that he could see through another's eyes and so forget himself. But over and over again in Milton's work we see himself. Over and over again we can say here Milton speaks of himself, here he shows us his own heart, his own pain. He is one of the most self-ful of all poets. He has none of the dramatic power of Shakespeare, he cannot look through another's eyes, so he sees things only from one standpoint and that his own. He stands far apart from us, and is almost inhumanly cold. That is the reason why so many of us find him hard to love.

*Professor Raleigh.

When, on a bleak December day in 1606, more than three hundred years ago, Milton was born, Elizabeth was dead, and James of Scotland sat upon the throne, but many of the great Elizabethans still lived. Shakespeare was still writing, still acting, although he had become a man of wealth and importance and the owner of New Place. Ben Jonson was at the very height of his fame, the favorite alike of Court and Commons. Bacon was just rising to power and greatness, his Novum Organum still to come.

Raleigh, in prison, was eating his heart out in the desire for freedom, trying to while away the dreary hours with chemical experiments, his great history not yet begun. Of the crowd of lyric writers some were boys at college, some but children in the nursery, and some still unborn. Yet in spite of the many writers who lived at or about the same time, Milton stands alone in our literature.

John Milton was the son of a London scrivener, that is, a kind of lawyer. He was well-to-do and a Puritan. Milton's home, however, must have been brighter than many a Puritan home, for his father loved music, and not only played well, but also composed. He taught his son to play too, and all through his life Milton loved music.

John was a pretty little boy with long golden brown hair, a fair face and dark gray eyes. But to many a strict Puritan, beauty was an abomination, and we are told that one of Milton's schoolmasters ”was a Puritan in Ess.e.x who cut his hair short.”

No doubt to him a boy with long hair was unseemly. John was the eldest and much beloved son of his father, who perhaps petted and spoiled him. He was clever as well as pretty, and already at the age of ten he was looked upon by his family as a poet. He was very studious, for besides going to St. Paul's School he had a private tutor. Even with that he was not satisfied, but studied alone far into the night. ”When he went to schoole, when he was very young,” we are told, ”he studied hard and sate up very late: commonly till twelve or one at night. And his father ordered the mayde to sitt up for him. And in those years he composed many copies of verses, which might well become a riper age.”* We can imagine to ourselves the silence of the house, when all the Puritan household had been long abed. We can picture the warm quiet room where sits the little fair-haired boy poring over his books by the light of flickering candles, while in the shadow a stern-faced white-capped Puritan woman waits. She sits very straight in her chair, her worn hands are folded, her eyes heavy with sleep. Sometimes she nods. Then with a start she shakes herself wide awake again, murmuring softly that it is no hour for any Christian body to be out o' bed, wondering that her master should allow so young a child to keep so long over his books.

Still she has her orders, so with a patient sigh she folds her hands again and waits. Thus early did Milton begin to shape his own course and to live a life apart from others.

*Aubrey.

At sixteen Milton went to Christ's College, Cambridge. And here he earned for himself the name of the Lady of Christ's, both because of his beautiful face and slender figure, and because he stood haughtily aloof from amus.e.m.e.nts which seemed to him coa.r.s.e or bad. In going to Cambridge, Milton had meant to study for the Church. But all through life he stood for liberty. ”He thought that man was made only for rebellion,” said a later writer.* As a child he had gone his own way, and as he grew older he found it harder and harder to agree with all that the Church taught--”till coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slaves, and take an oath withal. . . . I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.” Thus was he, he says, ”church-outed by the Prelates.”* Milton could not, with a free conscience, become a clergyman, so having taken his degree he went home to his father, who now lived in the country at Horton. He left Cambridge without regrets. No thrill of pleasure seemed to have warmed his heart in after days when he looked back upon the young years spent beside the Cam.