With this sonnet (for those lines are part of the last sonnet Milton ever wrote) it would seem as if a new period began with Milton, his second period of poetry writing.  Who knows but that it was the sharp sorrow of his loss which sent him back to poetry.  For throughout Milton’s life we can see that it was always something outside himself which made him write poetry.  He did not sing like the birds because he must, but because he was asked to sing by some person, or made to sing by some circumstance.

However that may be, it was now that Milton began his greatest work, Paradise Lost.  Twenty years before the thought had come to him that he would write a grand epic.  We have scarcely spoken of an epic since that first of all our epics, the Story of Beowulf.  And although others had written epics, Milton is to be remembered as the writer of the great English epic.  At first he thought of taking Arthur for his hero, but as more and more he saw what a mass of fable had gathered round Arthur, as more and more he saw how plain a hero Arthur seemed, stripped of that fable, his mind turned from the subject.  And when, at last, after twenty years of almost unbroken silence as a poet, he once more let his organ voice be heard, it was not a man he spoke of, but Man.  He told the story which Caedmon a thousand years before had told of the war in heaven, of the temptation and fall of man, and of how Adam and Eve were driven out of the happy garden.

    “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
    Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
    Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
    With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
    Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
    Sing, Heavenly Muse.”

You will remember, or if you look back to Chapter XIII you can read again about the old poet Caedmon and what he wrote.  It was in 1655 that Junius published the so-called Caedmon Manuscript, and Milton, who was so great a student, no doubt heard of it and found some one to read it to him.  And perhaps these poems helped to decide him in his choice, although many years before he had thought of writing on the subject.

Perhaps when you are older it may interest you to read the poems of Milton and the poems of Caedmon together.  Then you will see how far ahead of the old poet Milton is in smooth beauty of verse, how far behind him sometimes in tender knowledge of man and woman.  But I do not think you can hope to read Paradise Lost with true pleasure yet a while.  It is a long poem in blank verse, much of it will seem dull to you, and you will find it hard to be interested in Adam and Eve.  For Milton set himself a task of enormous difficulty when he tried to interest common men and women in people who were without sin, who knew not good nor evil.  Yet if conceit, if self-assurance, if the want of the larger charity which helps us to understand another’s faults, are sins, then Adam sinned long before he left Milton’s Paradise.  In fact, Adam is often a bore, and at times he proves himself no gentleman in the highest and best meaning of the word.