The next year Milton began his Paradise Regained.  In 1671 appeared his last important work, Samson Agonistes, the most powerful dramatic poem on the Greek model which our language possesses.  The picture of Israel’s mighty champion, blind, alone, afflicted by thoughtless enemies but preserving a noble ideal to the end, is a fitting close to the life work of the poet himself.  For years he was silent, dreaming who shall say what dreams in his darkness, and saying cheerfully to his friends, “Still guides the heavenly vision.”  He died peacefully in 1674, the most sublime and the most lonely figure in our literature.

MILTON’S EARLY POETRY.[166] In his early work Milton appears as the inheritor of all that was best in Elizabethan literature, and his first work, the ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” approaches the high-water mark of lyric poetry in England.  In the next six years, from 1631 to 1637, he wrote but little, scarcely more than two thousand lines, but these are among the most exquisite and the most perfectly finished in our language.

“L’Allegro” and “II Penseroso” are twin poems, containing many lines and short descriptive passages which linger in the mind like strains of music, and which are known and loved wherever English is spoken.  “L’Allegro” (the joyous or happy man) is like an excursion into the English fields at sunrise.  The air is sweet; birds are singing; a multitude of sights, sounds, fragrances, fill all the senses; and to this appeal of nature the soul of man responds by being happy, seeing in every flower and hearing in every harmony some exquisite symbol of human life.  “Il Penseroso” takes us over the same ground at twilight and at moonrise.  The air is still fresh and fragrant; the symbolism is, if possible, more tenderly beautiful than before; but the gay mood is gone, though its memory lingers in the afterglow of the sunset.  A quiet thoughtfulness takes the place of the pure, joyous sensation of the morning, a thoughtfulness which is not sad, though like all quiet moods it is akin to sadness, and which sounds the deeps of human emotion in the presence of nature.  To quote scattered lines of either poem is to do injustice to both.  They should be read in their entirety the same day, one at morning, the other at eventide, if one is to appreciate their beauty and suggestiveness.

The “Masque of Comus” is in many respects the most perfect of Milton’s poems.  It was written in 1634 to be performed at Ludlow Castle before the earl of Bridgewater and his friends.  There is a tradition that the earl’s three children had been lost in the woods, and, whether true or not, Milton takes the simple theme of a person lost, calls in an Attendant Spirit to protect the wanderer, and out of this, with its natural action and melodious songs, makes the most exquisite pastoral drama that we possess.  In form it is a masque, like those gorgeous products of the Elizabethan age of which