d Wordsworth's _The Cuckoo at Laverna_.

II (1631).

This sonnet Milton appears to have sent with a prose letter to a friend
who had remonstrated with him on the life of desultory study which he was
so long continuing to lead. In this letter he professes the principle of
"not taking thought of being _late_, so it gave advantage to be more
fit." He adds, "That you may see that I am something suspicious of
myself, and do take notice of a certain _belatedness_ in me, I am the
bolder to send you some of my nightward thoughts some little while ago,
because they come in not altogether unfitly, made up in a Petrarchian
stanza, which I told you of."

8. timely-happy: wise with the wisdom proportionate to one's years.
Similar compounds of two adjectives in Shakespeare are very frequent; for
example, holy-cruel, heady-rash, proper-false, devilish-holy, cold-pale.

10. even: equal, adequate.

VIII (1642).

The occasion of this sonnet was the near approach of the royalist army to
London, early in the Civil War. The people of the city had reason to fear
the entrance of the cavalier troops and the sacking of the houses of
citizens obnoxious to the party of the king. Milton would have been an
object of special animosity to victorious royalists, and for a short time
he had grounds for the acutest anxiety. It is not easy to see how, in
case of actual pillage of the city, he could have made use of such an
appeal as this. The sonnet is probably to be regarded as a work of art
constructed when the vicissitudes which it pictures were happily past,
and when the poet's mind had regained its tranquillity.

1. Note that Colonel has three syllables, according to the pronunciation
prevailing in Milton's time. Look up the etymology of this word.

10. The great Emathian conqueror: Alexander the Great, called Emathian
from Emathia, a district of his kingdom of Macedonia.

11. bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the
ground. Alexander destroyed the city of Thebes in 335 B.C. Pindar, the
famous lyric poet, a native and resident of Thebes, had then been dead
more than a century. But Pindar's house still stood, and was left
standing by the conqueror, who destroyed all other buildings of the city.

12. the repeated air Of sad Electra's poet had the power To save the
Athenian walls from ruin bare. To quote from Plutarch, Life of Lysander:
"The proposal