lighted but
still wondering alien, not those of the native. None is more often
quoted than the passage in the ninth book of _Paradise Lost_--

"As one who, long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight--
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound--
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look sums all delight."

{26} And the secret of its charm obviously lies partly in the note of a
personal experience. Just in that way must Milton, as boy and man,
have often issued forth from the weariness of his studies and the noise
and confinement of the streets, for a walk among the open fields that
then lay so close at hand for the Londoner. And perhaps, as the
inhabitants of towns often do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows
unknown to those who saw them every day. The present Poet Laureate,
who has spent most of his life in the country, has asked a question to
which it is not easy for the countryman to give the answer he would
like--

"Whose spirit leaps more high,
Plucking the pale primrose,
Than his whose feet must fly
The pasture where it grows?"

If the town-dweller never attains to that mystical communion with the
secret soul of Nature which Wordsworth and such as Wordsworth owe to a
life spent in the "temple's inmost shrine," yet his eye, undulled by
familiarity, commonly sees more in trees and flowers than the eyes of
nearly all those who live every day among them. At its highest
familiarity breeds intimacy, but more often what it breeds is
indifference. A man who {27} reads the Bible for the first time in
middle life will never live inside it as some saints have lived; but he
will see much that is hidden from most of those who have been reading
it every day since they could read at all.

Milton remained in London, so far as we know, for the first sixteen
years of his life. He was educated at St. Paul's School by a private
tutor, one Thomas Young, who was later a conspicuous Presbyterian
figure, and by his father, to whom he owed far more than to any one
except himself. The elder John Milton was a remarkable man. He had,
to begin with, deserted the religious views of his family and taken a
l