beginning he was sure of himself and sure of his mission; he had his purpose plain and clear.  There is no mental development, hardly, visible in his work, only training, undertaken anxiously and prayerfully and with a clearly conceived end.  He designed to write a masterpiece and he would not start till he was ready.  The first twenty years of his life were spent in assiduous reading; for twenty more he was immersed in the dust and toil of political conflict, using his pen and his extraordinary equipment of learning and eloquence to defend the cause of liberty, civil and religious, and to attack its enemies; not till he was past middle age had he reached the leisure and the preparedness necessary to accomplish his self-imposed work.  But all the time, as we know, he had it in his mind.  In Lycidas, written in his Cambridge days, he apologizes to his readers for plucking the fruit of his poetry before it is ripe.  In passage after passage in his prose works he begs for his reader’s patience for a little while longer till his preparation be complete.  When the time came at last for beginning he was in no doubt; in his very opening lines he intends, he says, to soar no “middle flight.”  This self-assured unrelenting certainty of his, carried into his prose essays in argument, produces sometimes strange results.  One is peculiarly interesting to us now in view of current controversy.  He was unhappily married, and because he was unhappy the law of divorce must be changed.  A modern—­George Eliot for instance—­would have pleaded the artistic temperament and been content to remain outside the law.  Milton always argued from himself to mankind at large.

[Footnote 4:  “Milton,” E.M.L., and “Milton” (Edward Arnold).]

In everything he did, he put forth all his strength.  Each of his poems, long or short, is by itself a perfect whole, wrought complete.  The reader always must feel that the planning of each is the work of conscious, deliberate, and selecting art.  Milton never digresses; he never violates harmony of sound or sense; his poems have all their regular movement from quiet beginning through a rising and breaking wave of passion and splendour to quiet close.  His art is nowhere better seen than in his endings.

Is it Lycidas?  After the thunder of approaching vengeance on the hireling shepherds of the Church, comes sunset and quiet: 

“And now the sun had stretch’d out all the hills,
 And now was dropt into the western bay;
 At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: 
 To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Is it Paradise Lost?  After the agonies of expulsion and the flaming sword—­

“Some natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;
 The world was all before them where to choose
 Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
 They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
 Through Eden took their solitary way.”