Life had now come for Milton to a peaceful evening time, but his work was not yet finished.  He had two great poems still to write.

One was Paradise Regained.  In this he shows how man’s lost happiness was found again in Christ.  Here is a second temptation, the temptation in the wilderness, but this time Satan is defeated, Christ is victorious.

The second poem was Samson Agonistes, which tells the tragic story of Samson in his blindness.  And no one reading it can fail to see that it is the story too of Milton in his blindness.  It is Milton himself who speaks when he makes Samson exclaim:—­

    “O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! 
    Blind among enemies:  O worse than chains,
    Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age! 
    Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,
    And all her various objects of delight
    Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased. 
    Inferior to the vilest now become
    Of man or worm:  the vilest here excel me,
    They creep, yet see; I, dark in light, exposed
    To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
    Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
    In power of others, never in my own;—­
    O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
    Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
    Without all hope of day!”

This was Milton’s last poem.  He lived still four years longer and still wrote.  But his singing days were over, and what he now wrote was in prose.  His life’s work was done, and one dark November evening in 1674 he peacefully died.

    “Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: 
    Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: 
    Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
    So didst thou travel on life’s common way."*

    Wordsworth.

Chapter LIX BUNYAN—­“THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS”

THE second great Puritan writer of England was John Bunyan.  He was born in 1628, more than twenty years after Milton.  His father was a tinker.  A tinker!  The word makes us think of ragged, weather-worn men and women who wander about the countryside.  They carry bundles of old umbrellas, and sometimes a battered kettle or two.  They live, who knows how? they sleep, who knows where?  Sometimes in our walks we come across a charred round patch upon the grass in some quiet nook by the roadside, and we know the tinkers have been there, and can imagine all sorts of stories about them.  Or sometimes, better still, we find them really there by the roadside boiling a mysterious three-legged black kettle over a fire of sticks.

But John Bunyan’s father was not this kind of tinker.  He did not wander about the countryside, but lived at the little village of Elstow, about a mile from the town of Bedford, as his father had before him.  He was a poor and honest workman who mended his neighbors’ kettles and pans, and did his best to keep his family in decent comfort.