live." He published these bold words in 1641, when he
had given no public proof at all of their truth. Such a man was not
likely to be unwilling that his verses should be seen: and in
particular such poems as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose death
aroused much public interest, or the _Ode on the Nativity_, plainly
challenging the greatest of his predecessors by its high theme and
noble art, are almost sure to have got about and won him some fame.

He had earned distinction, then, and aroused expectation before the end
of his university career. But what surprised his contemporaries was
that for the next seven or eight years he appeared to do little or
nothing to justify the one or fulfil the other. Leaving Cambridge when
he was twenty-three, he entered no profession, but lived till he was
past twenty-nine in studious retirement at his father's country house
at Horton near Windsor. His father, and other friends, very {38}
naturally remonstrated at this apparent inactivity. To them all the
answer is the same. He cannot now enter the Church, as he had
intended, because he would not "subscribe slave" and take oaths that he
could not keep. He is not surrendering himself to "the endless delight
of speculation," or to the pleasure of "dreaming away his years in the
arms of studious retirement." No; he has other things in view than
these: but for their performance he demands time for himself and
patience from his friends: his own thought is not of being early or
late but of being fit. And the work for which he is preparing is in
his own mind a settled thing. It is literature, poetry, and, in
particular, as will soon appear more definitely, a great poem to take
its place among the great poems of the world.

The writing of poetry has never been a recognized and seldom a
lucrative profession. Most poets, like other artists, have had to face
family opposition and the danger of poverty in obeying their inward
call. In this matter Milton is one of the great exceptions. Many
poets have had fathers as rich as his, but it would not be easy to find
one who resigned himself so cheerfully to the prospect of having a
poetic son. The elder Milton was, however, as we have seen, no
ordinary man. His sense {39} of the value of the things of the mind
was almost as great as his faith in his son and far greater than his
ambition for his son's visible success in the eyes of the world. He
had naturally hoped that that son's evi