through the wide expanse of anxious and
listening Europe." Having sacrificed the use of his eyes to the service
of the commonweal, he bates not a jot of heart or hope--

What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In Liberty's defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.

And while thus his fighting years are filled with the exaltation of
battle, as he plumes and lifts himself upon the cause that is going
forward, the story of his closing years has in it much of the pathos of a
lost cause. It was remarked by Johnson that there is in the _Paradise
Lost_ little opportunity for the pathetic; only one passage, indeed, is
allowed by him to be truly deserving of that name. But the description of
the remorse and reconcilement of Adam and Eve, which Johnson doubtless
intended, will not compare, for moving quality, with the matchless
invocation to the Seventh Book--

More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.

Then the noise that he had heard, in imagination only, thirty years
earlier, assails his bodily ears; as evening sets in, the wonted roar is
up, not in the wild woods of fancy inhabited by the sensual magician and
his crew, but in the unlighted streets of Restoration London, as a chorus
of cup-shotten brawlers goes roaring by. The king is enjoying his own
again; and the poet, hunted and harassed in his last retreat, raises his
petition again to the Muse whom he had invoked at the beginning of his
task,--not Clio nor her sisters, but the spirit of heavenly power and
heavenly wisdom; his mind reverts to that story of Orpheus which had
always had so singular and personal a fascination for him; of Orpheus,
who, holding himself aloof from the mad amorists of Thrace, was by them
torn to pieces during the orgy of the Dionysia, and sent rolling down the
torrent of the Hebrus; and he prays to his goddess and guardian--

But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the s