O happy persecution, I embrace thee
   With an unfettered soul!  So sweet a thing
   It is to sigh upon the rack of love,
   Where each calamity is groaning witness
   Of the poor martyr’s faith.  I never heard
   Of any true affection, but ’twas nipt
   With care, that, like the caterpillar, eats
   The leaves off the spring’s sweetest book, the rose. 
   Love, bred on earth, is often nursed in hell: 
   By rote it reads woe, ere it learn to spell.

Again:  the “secure tyrant, but unhappy lover,” whose prisoner and rival has thus expressed his triumphant resignation, is counselled by his friend to “go laugh and lie down,” as not having slept for three nights; but answers, in words even more delicious than his supplanter’s: 

   Alas, how can I? he that truly loves
   Burns out the day in idle fantasies;
   And when the lamb bleating doth bid good-night
   Unto the closing day, then tears begin
   To keep quick time unto the owl, whose voice
   Shrieks like the bellman in the lover’s ears: 
   Love’s eye the jewel of sleep, O, seldom wears! 
   The early lark is wakened from her bed,
   Being only by love’s plaints disquieted;
   And, singing in the morning’s ear, she weeps,
   Being deep in love, at lovers’ broken sleeps: 
   But say a golden slumber chance to tie
   With silken strings the cover of love’s eye,
   Then dreams, magician-like, mocking present
   Pleasures, whose fading leaves more discontent.

Perfect in music, faultless in feeling, exquisite in refined simplicity of expression, this passage is hardly more beautiful and noble than one or two in the play which follows.  “The Phoenix” is a quaint and homely compound of satirical realism in social studies with Utopian invention in the figure of an ideal prince, himself a compound of Harun-al-Rashid and “Albert the Good,” who wanders through the play as a detective in disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy.  The whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor, Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the signs that we are here still on the debatable borderland between the old Morality and the new Comedy—­a province where incarnate vices and virtues are seen figuring and posturing in what can scarcely be called masquerade.  But the two fine soliloquies of Phoenix on the corruption of the purity of law (act i. scene iv.) and the profanation of the sanctity of marriage (act ii. scene ii.) are somewhat riper and graver in style, with less admixture of rhyme and more variety of cadence, than the lovely verses above quoted.  Milton’s obligation to the latter passage is less direct than his earlier obligation to a later play of Middleton’s from which he transferred one of the most beautiful as well as most famous images in “Lycidas”:  but his early and intimate acquaintance with Middleton had apparently (as Mr. Dyce seems to think[1]) left in the ear of the blind old poet a more or less distinct echo from the noble opening verses of the dramatist’s address to “reverend and honorable matrimony.”