" Something may also be set down to the character of the Puritan
leaders, alien to all poetry, and knowing no books but the Bible.
The mental isolation in which the great poet lived his life, is
a remarkable feature of his biography. It was not only after the
Restoration that he appears lonely and friendless; it was much
the same during the previous period of the Parliament and the
Protectorate. Just at one time, about 1641, we hear from our best
authority, Phillips, of his cultivating the society of men of his own
age, and "keeping a gawdy-day", but this only once in three weeks or
a month, with "two gentlemen of Gray's Inn." He had, therefore, known
what it was to be sociable. But the general tenour of his life was
other; proud, reserved, self-contained, repellent; brooding over his
own ideas, not easily admitting into his mind the ideas of others. It
is indeed an erroneous estimate of Milton to attribute to him a hard
or austere nature. He had all the quick sensibility which belongs to
the poetic temperament, and longed to be loved that he might love
again. But he had to pay the penalty of all who believe in their own
ideas, in that their ideas come between them and the persons that
approach them, and constitute a mental barrier which can only be
broken down by sympathy.
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