Now indeed had Milton fallen on dark and evil days.  He had escaped with his life and was free.  But all that he had worked for during the past twenty years he saw shattered as at one blow.  He saw his friends suffering imprisonment and death, himself forsaken and beggared.  He found no sympathy at home.  His daughters, who had not loved their father in his days of wealth and ease, loved him still less in poverty.  They sold his books, cheated him with the housekeeping money, and in every way added to his unhappiness.  At length, as a way out of the misery and confusion of his home, Milton married for the third time.

The new wife was a placid, kindly woman.  She managed the house, managed too the wild, unruly girls as no one had managed them before.  She saw the folly of keeping them, wholly untamed and half-educated as they were, at home, and persuaded her husband to let them learn something by which they might earn a living.  So they went out into the world “to learn some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture, that are proper for women to learn, particularly embroideries in gold and silver.”

Thus for the last few years of his life Milton was surrounded by peace and content such as he had never before known.  All through life he had never had any one to love him deeply except his father and his mother, whose love for him was perhaps not all wise.  Those who had loved him in part had feared him too, and the fear outdid the love.  But now in the evening of his days, if no perfect love came to him, he found at least kindly understanding.  His wife admired him and cared for him.  She had a fair face and pretty voice, and it is pleasant to picture the gray-haired poet sitting at his organ playing while his wife sings.  He cannot see the sun gleam and play in her golden hair, or the quick color come and go in her fair face, but at least he can take joy in the sound of her sweet fresh voice.

It was soon after this third marriage that Paradise Lost was finished and published.  And even in those wild Restoration days, when laughter and pleasure alone were sought, men acknowledged the beauty and grandeur of this grave poem.  “This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too,” said Dryden, another and younger poet.

People now came to visit the author of Paradise Lost, as before they had come to visit great Cromwell’s secretary.  We have a pleasant picture of him sitting in his garden at the door of his house on sunny days to enjoy the fresh air, for of the many houses in which Milton lived not one was without a garden.  There, even when the sun did not shine, wrapt in a great coat of coarse gray cloth, he received his visitors.  Or when the weather was colder he sat in an upstairs room hung with rusty green.  He wore no sword, as it was the fashion in those days to do, and his clothes were black.  His long, light gray hair fell in waves round his pale but not colorless face, and the sad gray eyes with which he seemed to look upon his visitors were still clear and beautiful.