Milton loitered here at Horton for six years, and in that time produced just six poems.

He was thirty-two years of age, and had never earned a sixpence.  But what booted it!  His father and mother’s home was his:  they gladly supplied his every want; and his mother, especially, was ever his kindly critic and most intimate friend.  His days were spent in study, dreams, lonely walks across green fields, and homecomings when, with his mother’s hand in his, he would talk or recite to her in order to clarify the thought that pressed upon him.  Very calm, very peaceful and very beautiful were those days.  “The pensive attitude of mind brings the best result—­not the active,” he used to say.  It was then he wrote to his old friend, Diodati:  “You asked what I am about—­what I am thinking of?  Why, with God’s help, I am thinking of immortality.  Forgive the word, it is for your ear alone—­I am pluming my wings for flight.”

The good mother had misty, prophetic visions of what this flight might be, and had ceased to counsel her son against the sin of idleness.  But she did not live to see her prophecies confirmed, for in this time of peace and love, when the vibrant air was filled with hope, she passed Beyond.

Long years after, John Milton exclaimed, “Oh!  Why could she not have lived to know!” And the poignant grief of this son, then a man in years (with his thirtieth birthday well behind), turned on the thought that he had disappointed Her—­the mother who had loved him into being.

* * * * *

Milton’s woes began with his marriage—­they have given rise to nearly as much discussion as his poetry.  In his “Defensio Secunda,” he tells, with a touch of pride, of the absolute innocency that continued until his thirty-fifth year.  When we consider how his combined innocence and ignorance plunged him into a sudden marriage with a bit of pink-and-white protoplasm, aged seventeen, we can not but regret that he had not devoted a little of his valuable time to a study of femininity.  And in some way we think of Thackeray, when he was being shown the marvelous works of a certain amateur artist.  “Look at that! look at that!” cried the zealous guide, “and he never had a lesson in art in his life!”

Thackeray adjusted his glasses, looked at the picture carefully, sighed and said, “What a pity he didn’t have just a little good instruction!”

Milton the student, versed in abstractions and full of learned lore, went up the Thames seeking a little needed rest.  Five miles from Oxford lived an ebb-tide aristocratic family by the name of Powell.  Milton had long known this family, and, it seems, decided to tarry with them a day or so.  Just why he sought their company no one ever knew, and Milton was too proud to tell.  The brown thrush, rival of the lark and mockingbird, seldom seeks the society of the blue jay.  But it did this time.  The Powells were a roaring, riotous, roystering, fox-hunting, genteel, but reduced family, on the eve of bankruptcy, with marriageable daughters.