ld not willingly let it die." So, as his extant notes show, he was
weighing a large number of subjects for the great poem, slowly settling
on a Biblical one, and indeed on that of the Fall of Man, and perhaps
writing some earliest lines of what we now know as _Paradise Lost_.

But in November 1640 occurred an event which governed Milton's life for
the next twenty years. The Long Parliament met, and, from that time
forward till its final meeting in 1660 to dissolve itself and prepare
the way for Charles II, politics were the dominant interest of Milton's
mind. It is his age of prose; during it he wrote very little verse of
any kind, and none of importance except the finer of his eighteen
Sonnets which nearly all belong to these years. On the other hand,
most of his prose works were written between 1640 and 1660. Of these
it is enough to say that they are perhaps the most curious of all
illustrations of the great things which a poet alone can bring to prose
and of the dangers which he runs in bringing them. A poet of the
stature of Milton is ready at all times to catch all kinds of fire, not
only the fires of faith and zeal and enthusiasm, but also, as a rule,
those of a scorn {48} that knows no limit and a hatred that knows no
mercy. Such a man needs a strongly made vessel to control his boiling
ardours. Prose is not such a vessel: and they too often overflow from
it in extravagance and violence. Poetry in all its severer forms
places a restraint upon the poet from which as the mood of art gains
upon him he has no desire to escape. Law and limitation, willing
obedience to the prescribed conditions, are of the very essence of art.
And this is as true of the greatest of the arts as of any other. It is
not merely that the poet accepts the bondage of rhymes, or stanzas, or
numbered syllables, as the painter accepts those of a flat canvas and
the sculptor those of bronze or marble; it is that they all alike
submit to the mood of art which is always universal and eternal as well
as individual and temporal and therefore disdains such crudities of
personal violence as are to be found everywhere in Milton's prose and
nowhere in his poetry.

But if a poet's prose has its inevitable disadvantages it has also some
great qualities which only a poet can supply. In 1640 Milton plunged
into a great struggle in which his attitude throughout was that of an
angry and contemptuous partisan. And his pamphlets exhibit all the
di