WHEN THE ASSAULT WAS INTENDED TO THE CITY [NOVEMBER, 1642.]

    Captain, or Colonel, or Knight in arms,
        Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
        If deed of honour did thee ever please,
        Guard them, and him within protect from harms. 
    He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
        That call fame on such gentle acts as these,
        And he can spread thy name o’er lands and seas,
        Whatever clime the sun’s bright circle warms. 
    Lift not thy spear against the Muse’s bower: 
        The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
        The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
    Went to the ground; and the repeated air
        Of sad Electra’s poet had the power
        To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.

If this strain seems deficient in the fierceness befitting a besieged patriot, let it be remembered that Milton’s doors were literally defenceless, being outside the rampart of the City.

We now approach the most curious episode of Milton’s life, and the most irreconcilable with the conventional opinion of him.  Up to this time this heroic existence must have seemed dull to many, for it has been a life without love.  He has indeed, in his beautiful Sonnet to the Nightingale (about 1632), professed himself a follower of Love:  but if so, he has hitherto followed at a most respectful distance.  Yet he had not erred, when in the Italian sonnet, so finely rendered in Professor Masson’s biography, he declared the heart his vulnerable point:—­

   “Young, gentle-natured, and a simple wooer,
        Since from myself I stand in doubt to fly,
        Lady, to thee my heart’s poor gift would I
        Offer devoutly; and by tokens sure
    I know it faithful, fearless, constant, pure,
        In its conceptions graceful, good, and high. 
        When the world roars, and flames the startled sky;
        In its own adamant it rests secure;
    As free from chance and malice ever found,
        And fears and hopes that vulgar minds confuse,
        As it is loyal to each manly thing
    And to the sounding lyre and to the Muse. 
        Only in that part is it not so sound
        Where Love hath set in it his cureless sting.”

It is highly probable that the very reaction from party strife turned the young man’s fancies to thoughts of love in the spring of 1643.  Escorted, we must fear, by a chorus of mocking cuckoos, Milton, about May 21st, rode into the country on a mysterious errand.  It is a ghoulish and ogreish idea, but it really seems as if the elder Milton quartered his progeny upon his debtors, as the ichneumon fly quarters hers upon caterpillars.  Milton had, at all events for the last sixteen years, been regularly drawing interest from an Oxfordshire squire, Richard Powell of Forest Hill, who owed him L500, which must have been originally advanced by the elder Milton.