sung, but narrower bound
Within the visible diurnal sphere:
Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole,
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude: yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few;
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revelers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamor drowned
Both harp and voice, nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores;
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream." [16]

"An ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright, found John Milton in
a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow-chair, and
dressed neatly in black; pale, but not cadaverous. . . . He used also
to sit in a gray coarse-cloth coat at the door of his house near
Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather;" [17] and the common people said
he was inspired.

If from the man we turn to his works, we are struck at once with two
singular contrasts. The first of them is this:--The distinction
between ancient and modern art is sometimes said, and perhaps truly, to
consist in the simple bareness of the imaginative conceptions which we
find in ancient art, and the comparatively complex clothing in which
all modern creations are embodied. If we adopt this distinction,
Milton seems in some sort ancient, and in some sort modern. Nothing is
so simple as the subject-matter of his works. The two greatest of his
creations, the character of Satan and the character of Eve, are two of
the simplest--the latter probably the very simplest--in the whole field
of literature. On this side Milton's art is classical. On the other
hand, in no writer is the imagery more profuse, the illustrations more
various, the dress altogether more splendid; and in this respect the
style of his art seems romantic and modern. In real truth, however, it
is only ancient art in a modern disguise: the dress is a mere dress,
and can be stripped off when we will,--we all of us do perhaps in
memory strip it off for ourselves. Notwithstanding the lavish
adornments with which her image is presented, the charac