His outward hopes were blasted, and he
returned with concentrated ardour to woo the muse, from whom he had so
long truanted. The passion which seethes beneath the stately march of
the verse in _Paradise Lost_, is not the hopeless moan of despair, but
the intensified fanaticism which defies misfortune to make it "bate
one jot of heart or hope." The grand loneliness of Milton after 1668,
"is reflected in his three great poems by a sublime independence of
human sympathy, like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff
us" (_Lowell_).
Late then, but not too late, Milton, at the age of fifty-two,
fell back upon the rich resources of his own mind, upon poetical
composition, and the study of good books, which he always asserted to
be necessary to nourish and sustain a poet's imagination. Here he had
to contend with the enormous difficulty of blindness. He engaged a
kind of attendant to read to him. But this only sufficed for English
books--imperfectly even for these--and the greater part of the choice,
not extensive, library upon which Milton drew, was Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, and the modern languages of Europe.
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