f his father had not proved in his
case a snare or a cumbrance, but the necessary condition of the
learning and the leisure he had used so nobly. Finally, to give no
more instances, there is the confession at once so personal and so
representative of the feeling of all men who have ever made the
smallest effort to live well--

"Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk,
Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear,
And tunable as sylvan pipe or song."

Who knows whether behind such words as these there lies the memory of
some rapturous vision of the new world of love as St. Paul saw it,
which had been cooled only too soon by humbling experience of the
difficulty of "bearing all things" when all things included Salmasius,
or an unthankful daughter?

This grave introspective note, present from the first in everything
written by Milton and far more conspicuous in _Paradise Regained_ than
in _Paradise Lost_, is felt still more in the {219} last of his works,
the drama _Samson Agonistes_. It is in the Greek form with a Chorus:
and is as broodingly full as Aeschylus or Sophocles of the folly of man
and the uncertainty and sadness of human life; but Milton has added an
angry sternness of judgment on the one hand, and on the other an
assured faith in divine deliverance, both of which are rather Hebrew
than Greek. Into this strange drama, so alien from all the literature
of his day, Milton has poured all the thoughts and emotions with which
the spectacle of his own life filled him. All through it we hear a
faith that was strong but never blind battling with the spectacle of
the wickedness of men and the dark uncertainty of the ways of God. The
Philistines have triumphed, lords sit "lordly in their wine" at
Whitehall, the Dagon of prelatism is once more enthroned throughout the
land, the saints are dispersed and forsaken, and he himself, who had as
he thought so signally borne his witness for God, sits blind and sad in
his lonely house, "to visitants a gaze Or pitied object," with no hope
left of high service to his country and no prospect but that of a
"contemptible old age obscure." No doubt he did not always feel like
that, for the evidence shows him cheerful and friendly in company: and,
of {220} course, the picture has undergone the imaginative heightening
of art besides being coloured by the story of Samson, so much sadder
than Milton's own. But the lonely hours of a blind man of genius who
has