nd greater sonnet on his blindness--

"When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide"

shows him content if need be to take his place among those whose desire
to serve {63} God must find its peace in the thought that

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

In the same spirit, perhaps, is the motto which he appended to his
signature in the album of a learned foreigner in 1651: "I am made
perfect in weakness." But nothing of weakness, not even its
perfection, could ever come near Milton. He played a greater part in
this world without his eyes than ever he had played with them. Without
their help he did what prose could do towards justifying the ways of
England to Europe, and was very soon to do what verse could do towards
justifying the ways of God to men. He cannot, perhaps, be said to have
succeeded in either, but one at least of the failures is a whole heaven
above what ordinary men call success.

A few words may be said of his attitude towards men and measures during
this political period of his life. His unqualified and immediate
support of the King's execution had, of course, united him with the
Cromwellian party who had brought it about. And his anti-Presbyterian
views carried him in the same direction. So we are not surprised to
find that, when Cromwell got rid of the Parliament by military force
and soon {64} afterwards became Protector, Milton approved his action
and gladly continued to serve under him. Nor was Milton the man to be
disturbed by the Protector's rapid dissolution of his first Parliament,
by the period of personal Government which followed, or by his angry
breach with his second Parliament. Poets have seldom understood
politics, and Milton, the most political of poets, perhaps less than
any. No man ever had less of that sense of law and custom, of the need
of continuity, which is the very centre and secret of politics. Few
great statesmen have been able to maintain perfect consistency; but the
least consistent have generally been aware that there was something in
inconsistencies that needed explanation. Milton never shows any
consciousness of the patent incongruity between his early exaltation of
the indefeasible rights of Parliaments and his support of the
Cromwellian attitude towards them: between his angry denunciation of
Charles I for presuming to retain the ancient right of the kings to
refuse their assent to Bills submitted to