blow
    To the full-voic’d choir below,
    In service high, and anthem clear,
    As may with sweetness through mine ear,
    Dissolve me into ecstacies,
    And bring all Heaven before mine eyes.”

In Lycidas Milton mourns the death of a friend who was drowned while crossing the Irish Channel.  He took the name from an Italian poem, which told of the sad death of another Lycidas.  The verse moves with even more stately measure than Il Penseroso.

“Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due:  For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:  Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. . . . . . .  Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise, (That last infirmity of noble minds) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life.”

It was during these early years spent at Horton, too, that Milton wrote his masque of Comus.  It is strange to find a Puritan poet writing a masque, for Puritans looked darkly on all acting.  It is strange to find that, in spite of the Puritan dislike to acting, the last and, perhaps, the best masque in our language should be written by a Puritan, and that not ten years before all the theaters in the land were closed by Puritan orders.  But although, in many ways, Milton was sternly Puritan, these were only the better ways.  He had no hatred of beauty, “God has instilled into me a vehement love of the beautiful,” he says.

The masque of Comus was written for a great entertainment given by the Earl of Bridgewater, at Ludlow Castle, and three of his children took part in it.  In a darksome wood, so the story runs, the enchanter, Comus, lived with his rabble rout, half brute, half man.  For to all who passed through the wood Comus offered a glass from which, if any drank, —­

        “Their human countenance,
    Th’ express resemblance of the gods, is changed
    Into some brutish form of wolf, or bear,
    Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat,
    All other parts remaining as they were.”

And they, forgetting their home and friends, henceforth live riotously with Comus.

Through this wood a Lady and her two brothers pass, and on the way the Lady is separated from her brothers and loses her way.  As she wanders about she is discovered by Comus who, disguising himself as a shepherd, offers her shelter in his “low but loyal cottage.”  The Lady, innocent and trusting, follows him.  But instead of leading her to a cottage he leads her to his palace.  There the Lady is placed in an enchanted chair from which she cannot rise, and Comus tempts her to drink from his magic glass.  The Lady refuses, and with his magic wand Comus turns her to seeming stone.