Milton was, like Dante, a statesman and a lover; and, like Dante, he had been unfortunate in ambition and in love.  He had survived his health and his sight, the comforts of his home, and the prosperity of his party.  Of the great men by whom he had been distinguished at his entrance into life, some had been taken away from the evil to come; some had carried into foreign climates their unconquerable hatred of oppression; some were pining in dungeons; and some had poured forth their blood on scaffolds.  Venal and licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent to clothe the thoughts of a pander in the style of a bellman, were now the favorite writers of the Sovereign and of the public.  It was a loathsome herd, which could be compared to nothing so fitly as to the rabble of Comus, grotesque monsters, half bestial, half human, dropping with wine, bloated with gluttony, and reeling in obscene dances.  Amidst these that fair Muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the Masque, lofty, spotless, and serene, to be chattered at, and pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole rout of Satyrs and Goblins.  If ever despondency and asperity could be excused in any man, they might have been excused in Milton.  But the strength of his mind overcame every calamity.  Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience.  His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equable.  His temper was serious, perhaps stern; but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or fretful.  Such as it was when, on the eve of great events, he returned from his travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions, and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it continued to be when, after having experienced every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, poor, sightless, and disgraced, he retired to his hovel to die.

Hence it was that, though he wrote the Paradise Lost at a time of life when images of beauty and tenderness are in general beginning to fade, even from those minds in which they have not been effaced by anxiety and disappointment, he adorned it with all that is most lovely and delightful in the physical and in the moral world.  Neither Theocritus nor Ariosto had a finer or a more healthful sense of the pleasantness of external objects, or loved better to luxuriate amidst sunbeams and flowers, the songs of nightingales, the juice of summer fruits, and the coolness of shady fountains.  His conception of love unites all the voluptuousness of the Oriental harem, and all the gallantry of the chivalric tournament with all the pure and quiet affection of an English fireside.  His poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery.  Nooks and dells, beautiful as fairyland, are embosomed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations.  The roses and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of the avalanche.