Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
    Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
    With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. 
    Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
    The world was all before them, where to choose
    Their place of rest, and Providence their guide. 
    They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
    Through Eden took their solitary way.”

Milton worked slowly at this grand poem.  Being blind he had now to depend on others to write out what poetry he made in his own mind, so it was written “in a parcel of ten, twenty, or thirty verses at a time by whatever hand came next.”  We are told that when he was dictating sometimes he sat leaning back sideways in an easy-chair, with his leg flung over the arm.  Sometimes he dictated from his bed, and if in the middle of the night lines came to him, whatever time it was he would ring for one of his daughters to write them down for him, lest the thought should be lost ere morning.

We are told, too, that he wrote very little in summer.  For he said himself that it was in winter and spring that his poetic fancy seemed to come best to him, and that what he wrote at other times did not please him.  “So that in all the years he was about this poem, he may be said to have spent but half his time therein."*

Philips.

But now, while Milton’s mind was full of splendid images, while in spite of the discomfort and lonliness of his misruled home, he was adding line to line of splendid sounding English, great changes came over the land.

Oliver Cromwell died.  To him succeeded his son Richard.  But his weak hands could not hold the scepter.  He could not bind together a rebel people as great Oliver had done.  In a few months he gave up the task, and little more than a year later the people who had wept at the death of the great Protector, were madly rejoicing at the return of a despot.

With a Stuart king upon the throne, there was no safety for the rebel poet who had used all the power of his wit and learning against the Royal cause.  Pity for his blindness might not save him.  So listening to the warnings of his friends, he fled into hiding somewhere in the city of London, “a place of retirement and abscondence.”

But after a time the danger passed, and Milton crept forth from his hiding-place.  It was perhaps pity for his blind helplessness, perhaps contempt for his powerlessness, that saved him, who can tell?  His books were burned by the common hangman, and he found himself in prison for a short time, but he was soon released.  While others were dying for their cause, the blind poet whose trumpet call had been Liberty!  Liberty! was contemptuously allowed to live.