Yet dissatisfied as he sometimes was, he was very sure of himself, and for five years he let his wings grow, as he himself said.  But these years were not altogether lost, for if both day and night Milton roamed the meadows about his home in seeming idleness, he was drinking in all the beauty of earth and sky, flower and field, storing his memory with sights and sounds that were to be a treasure to him in after days.  He studied hard, too, ranging at will through Greek and Latin literature.  “No delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies,” he says to a friend.  And as the outcome of these five fallow years Milton has left us some of his most beautiful poems.  They have not the stately grandeur of his later works, but they are natural and easy, and at times full of a joyousness which we never find in him again.  And before we can admire his great poem which he wrote later, we may love the beauty of L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas, which he wrote now.

L’Allegro and Il Penseroso are two poems which picture two moods in which the poet looks at life.  They are two moods which come to every one, the mirthful and the sad.  L’Allegro pictures the happy mood.  Here the man “who has, in his heart, cause for contentment” sings.  And the poem fairly dances with delight of being as it follows the day from dawn till evening shadows fall.  It begins by bidding “loathed Melancholy” begone “’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy,” and by bidding come “heart-easing Mirth.”

“Haste, thee, nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful Jollity, Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods and becks, and wretched smiles.  Such as hang on Hebe’s cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek; Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides.  Come, and trip it as ye go On the light fantastic toe. . . . . .  To hear the lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night, From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise.”

These are a few lines from the opening of the poem which you must read for yourselves, for if I quoted all that is beautiful in it I should quote the whole.

Il Penseroso pictures the thoughtful mood, or mood of gentle Melancholy.  Here Mirth is banished, “Hence fair deluding joys, the brood of Folly, and hail divinest Melancholy.”  The poem moves with more stately measure, “with even step, and musing gait,” from evening through the moonlit night till morn.  It ends with the poet’s desire to live a peaceful studious life.

    “But let my due feet never fail
    To walk the studious cloisters pale;
    And love the high embowed roof,
    With antique pillars massy proof,
    And storied windows richly dight,
    Casting a dim religious light. 
    There let the pealing organ