Here is a religious poet indeed, a visionary, a mystic, and a Christian;
none of which names can be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to
find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry, we cannot do better than
seek him among the lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton,
self-sufficient and censorious, denies the name of love to these songs of
the sons of Belial. Love, he says, reigns and revels in Eden, not

in court amours,
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenate, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.

Yet for the quick and fresh spirit of love in the poetry of that time we
must go to the sons of Belial. There is a pathetic passage in one of
Milton's divorce pamphlets, where, speaking of the unhappy choices in
marriage to which "soberest and best governed men" are liable, he
remarks:--"It is not strange though many, who have spent their youth
chastely, are in some things not so quick-sighted while they haste too
eagerly to light the nuptial torch; nor is it therefore that for a modest
error a man should forfeit so great a happiness, and no charitable means
to release him, since they who have lived most loosely, by reason of
their bold accustoming, prove most successful in their matches, because
their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces
to teach them experience."

The wild affections, unsettling at will, wrote better love-songs than the
steadfast principles of the sober and well-governed. Roystering
libertines like Sir Charles Sedley were more edifying lovers than the
austere husbands of Mary Powell and of Eve. Milton would have despised
and detested the pleasure-seeking philosophy of Sedley:--

Let us then ply those joys we have,
'Tis vain to think beyond the grave;
Out of our reach the Gods have laid
Of Time to come th' event,
And laugh to see the Fools afraid
Of what the Knaves invent.

But the self-abandonment and the passion of two or three of Sedley's
songs are out of Milton's reach:--

Not _Celia_ that I juster am,
Or better than the rest,
For I would change each hour like them,
Were not my heart at rest.

But I am ty'd to very thee
By every thought I have,
Thy face I only care to see,
Thy heart I only crave.

All that in woman is ador'd
In thy dear self I find,
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the ki