While at Cambridge it was the desire of his parents that Milton should take orders in the Church of England; but the intense love of mental liberty which stamped the Puritan was too strong within him, and he refused to consider the “oath of servitude,” as he called it, which would mark his ordination.  Throughout his life Milton, though profoundly religious, held aloof from the strife of sects.  In belief, he belonged to the extreme Puritans, called Separatists, Independents, Congregationalists, of which our Pilgrim Fathers are the great examples; but he refused to be bound by any creed or church discipline: 

    As ever in my great Task-Master’s eye.

In this last line of one of his sonnets[164] is found Milton’s rejection of every form of outward religious authority in face of the supreme Puritan principle, the liberty of the individual soul before God.

A long period of retirement followed Milton’s withdrawal from the university in 1632.  At his father’s country home in Horton he gave himself up for six years to solitary reading and study, roaming over the wide fields of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Italian, and English literatures, and studying hard at mathematics, science, theology, and music,—­a curious combination.  To his love of music we owe the melody of all his poetry, and we note it in the rhythm and balance which make even his mighty prose arguments harmonious.  In “Lycidas,” “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Arcades,” “Comus,” and a few “Sonnets,” we have the poetic results of this retirement at Horton,—­few, indeed, but the most perfect of their kind that our literature has recorded.

Out of solitude, where his talent was perfected, Milton entered the busy world where his character was to be proved to the utmost.  From Horton he traveled abroad, through France, Switzerland, and Italy, everywhere received with admiration for his learning and courtesy, winning the friendship of the exiled Dutch scholar Grotius, in Paris, and of Galileo in his sad imprisonment in Florence.[165] He was on his way to Greece when news reached him of the break between king and parliament.  With the practical insight which never deserted him Milton saw clearly the meaning of the news.  His cordial reception in Italy, so chary of praise to anything not Italian, had reawakened in Milton the old desire to write an epic which England would “not willingly let die”; but at thought of the conflict for human freedom all his dreams were flung to the winds.  He gave up his travels and literary ambitions and hurried to England.  “For I thought it base,” he says, “to be traveling at my ease for intellectual culture while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty.”

Then for nearly twenty years the poet of great achievement and still greater promise disappears.  We hear no more songs, but only the prose denunciations and arguments which are as remarkable as his poetry.  In all our literature there is nothing more worthy of the Puritan spirit than this laying aside of personal ambitions in order to join in the struggle for human liberty.  In his best known sonnet, “On His Blindness,” which reflects his grief, not at darkness, but at his abandoned dreams, we catch the sublime spirit of this renunciation.