Singular among poets in the serene fortune of the
first half of life, in the second half his piteous fate was to rank in
wretchedness with that of his masters, Dante or Tasso.
The biographer, acquainted with the event, has no difficulty in
predicting it, and in saying at this point in his story, that Milton
might have known better than, with his puritanical connections, to
have taken to wife a daughter of a cavalier house, to have brought her
from a roystering home, frequented by the dissolute officers of the
Oxford garrison, to the spare diet and philosophical retirement of a
recluse student, and to have looked for sympathy and response for his
speculations from an uneducated and frivolous girl. Love has blinded,
and will continue to blind, the wisest men to calculations as easy and
as certain as these. And Milton, in whose soul Puritan austerity was
as yet only contending with the more genial currents of humanity, had
a far greater than average susceptibility to the charm of woman. Even
at the later date of _Paradise Lost_, voluptuous thoughts, as Mr.
Hallam has observed, are not uncongenial to him.
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