emical works were burned by the hangman; and the pen that had so
powerfully battled for a party, now returned to the service of its first
love, poetry. His loss of power and place was the world's gain. In his
forced seclusion, he produced the greatest of English poems--religious,
romantic, and heroic.

ESTIMATE OF HIS PROSE.--Before considering his poems, we may briefly state
some estimate of his prose works. They comprise much that is excellent,
are full of learning, and contain passages of rarest rhetoric. He said
himself, that in prose he had only "the use of his left hand;" but it was
the left hand of a Milton. To the English scholar they are chiefly of
historical value: many of them are written in Latin, and lose much of
their terseness in a translation which retains classical peculiarities of
form and phrase.

His _History of England from the Earliest Times_ is not profound, nor
philosophical; he followed standard chronicle authorities, but made few,
if any, original investigations, and gives us little philosophy. His
tractate on _Education_ contains peculiar views of a curriculum of study,
but is charmingly written. He also wrote a treatise on _Logic_. Little
known to the great world outside of his poems, there is one prose work,
discovered only in 1823, which has been less read, but which contains the
articles of his Christian belief. It is a tractate on Christian doctrine:
no one now doubts its genuineness; and it proves him to have been a
Unitarian, or High Arian, by his own confession. This was somewhat
startling to the great orthodox world, who had taken many of their
conceptions of supernatural things from Milton's _Paradise Lost_; and yet
a careful study of that poem will disclose similar tendencies in the
poet's mind. He was a Puritan whose theology was progressive until it
issued in complete isolation: he left the Presbyterian ranks for the
Independents, and then, startled by the rise and number of sects, he
retired within himself and stood almost alone, too proud to be instructed,
and dissatisfied with the doctrines and excesses of his earlier
colleagues.

In 1653 he lost his wife, Mary Powell, who left him three daughters. He
supplied her place in 1656, by marrying Catherine Woodstock, to whom he
was greatly attached, and who also died fifteen months after. Eight years
afterward he married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, who survived him.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE POETRY OF MILTON.

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