HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD

ROBERT BROWNING

ROBERT BROWNING, a great English poet, was born near London in 1812, and died in Venice, Italy, in 1889.

Oh, to be in England

Now that April's there!

And whoever wakes in England

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Sees, some morning, unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, when my blossomed pear tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops -at the bent-spray's edge-
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew

The buttercups, the little children's dower,

-Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

JOHN MILTON AND THE PURITANS

JOHN RICHARD GREEN

John Milton is not only the highest but the completest type of Puritanism. His life is absolutely contemporaneous with his cause. He was born when it began to exercise a direct influence over English politics and English 5 religion; he died when its effort to mold them into its

own shape was over, and when it had again sunk into one of many influences to which we owe our English character.

Milton's youth shows us how much of gayety, poetic 10 ease, and intellectual culture lingered in a Puritan home. His surroundings were all rigidly Puritan, but there was nothing narrow or illiberal in his early training. "My father," he says, "destined me while yet a little boy to the study of humane letters, which I seized with such 15 eagerness that from the twelfth year of my age I scarcely ever went from my lessons to bed before midnight.”

In spite of a "certain reservedness of natural disposition," Milton could enjoy the world around him. There was nothing ascetic in his look, in his slender, vigorous 20 frame, his face full of a delicate yet serious beauty, and the rich brown hair that clustered over his brow. But his pleasures were "unreproved." From coarse self-indulgence the young Puritan turned with disgust. It was with this

temper that he passed from his London school to Christ's College at Cambridge, and it was this temper that he preserved throughout his university career.

In minds of a less cultured order this moral tension 5 ended no doubt in a hard, unsocial sternness of life. The ordinary Puritan "loved all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." His bond to other men was not the sense of a common manhood, but the recognition of a brotherhood among the elect. Without the pale 10 of the saints lay a world which was hateful to them. It was this utter isolation from the "ungodly" that explains the contrast which startles us between the inner tenderness of the Puritans and the ruthlessness of so many of their actions. Cromwell, whose son's death (in his own 15 words) went to his heart "like a dagger, indeed it did!" and who rode away sad and wearied from the triumph of Marston Moor, burst into horseplay as he signed the death warrant of the king.

During the Civil War Milton had been engaged in strife 20 with Presbyterians and with royalists, pleading for civil and religious freedom, for freedom of social life, and freedom of the press. At a later time he became Latin Secretary to the Protector, in spite of a blindness which had been brought on by the intensity of his study. The Restoration 25 found him of all men the most hateful to the royalists. Parliament ordered his book, The Defence of the English People, to be burned, and he was for a time imprisoned.

As age drew on he found himself reduced to comparative poverty and driven to sell his library for subsistence.

Nor was his home a happy one. His temper had become stern and exacting. His daughters, who were forced to read to their blind father in languages which they could 5 not understand, revolted against their bondage. But solitude and misfortune only brought into bolder relief Milton's inner greatness. There was a grand simplicity in the life of his later years. He listened every morning to a chapter of the Hebrew Bible and then pursued his studies 10 until midday. Then he took exercise for an hour, played for another hour upon the organ or viol, and renewed his studies. The evening was spent in converse with visitors and friends. For, lonely and unpopular as Milton was, there was one thing about him which made his house a 15 place of pilgrimage. He was the last of the Elizabethans. Possibly he had seen Shakespeare. His Comus had rivaled the masques of Ben Jonson. It was with a reverence drawn from thoughts like these that men looked on the blind poet as he sat, clad in black, in his chamber 20 hung with rusty green tapestry, his brown hair falling as of old over a calm, serene face, his cheeks delicately colored, his clear gray eyes showing no trace of their blindness.

During these years of persecution and loneliness he 25 mused on his great poem, Paradise Lost. It was published in 1667, and four years later Paradise Regained