The principal domestic events in Milton’s life, meanwhile, had been his marriage with Katherine, daughter of an unidentified Captain Woodcock, in November, 1656; and the successive loss of her and an infant daughter in February and March, 1658.  It is probable that Milton literally never saw his wife, whose worth and the consequent happiness of the fifteen months of their too brief union, are sufficiently attested by his sonnet on the dream in which he fancied her restored to him, with the striking conclusion, “Day brought back my night.”  Of his daughters at the time, much may be conjectured, but nothing is known; his nephews, whose education had cost him such anxious care, though not undutiful in their personal relations with him, were sources of uneasiness from their own misadventures, and might have been even more so as sinister omens of the ways in which the rising generation was to walk.  The fruits of their bringing up upon the egregious Lucretius and Manilius were apparently “Satyr against Hypocrites,” i.e., Puritans; “Mysteries of Love and Eloquence;” “Sportive Wit or Muses’ Merriment,” which last brought the Council down upon John Phillips as a propagator of immorality.  In his nephews Milton might have seen, though we may be sure he did not see, how fatally the austerity of the Commonwealth had alienated those who would soon determine whether the Commonwealth should exist.  Unconscious of the “engine at the door,” he could spend happy social hours with attached friends—­Andrew Marvell, his assistant in the secretaryship and poetical satellite; his old pupil Cyriack Skinner; Lady Ranelagh; Oldenburg, the Bremen envoy, destined to fame as Secretary of the Royal Society and the correspondent of Spinoza; and a choice band of “enthusiastic young men who accounted it a privilege to read to him, or act as his amanuenses, or hear him talk.”  A sonnet inscribed to one of these, Henry Lawrence, gives a pleasing picture of the British Homer in his Horatian hour:—­

   “Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
      Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,
      Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
      Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
    From the hard season gaining?  Time will run
      On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
      The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
      The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun. 
    What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
      Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
      To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
    Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air? 
      He who of those delights can judge, and spare
      To interpose them oft, is not unwise.”

CHAPTER VI.

   “Thought by thought in heaven-defying minds
    As flake by flake is piled, till some great truth
    Is loosened, and the nations echo round.”