a memorable dream. The house is all still,
the voices and the pattering feet of the children hushed in sleep,
and Milton too asleep, but with his waking thoughts pursuing him into
sleep and stirring the mimic fancy. Not this night, however, is it of
Heaven, or Hell, or Chaos, or the Universe of Man with its
luminaries, or any other of the objects of his poetic contemplation
by day, that dreaming images come. Nor yet is it the recollection of
any business, Piedmontese, Swedish, or French, last employing him
officially, that now passes into his involuntary visions. His mind is
wholly back on himself, his hard fate of blindness, and his again
vacant and desolate household. But lo! as he dreams, that seems
somehow all a mistake, and the household is _not_ desolate. A
radiant figure, clothed in white, approaches him and bends over him.
He knows it to be his wife, whom he had thought dead, but who is not
dead. Her face is veiled, and he cannot see that; but then he had
never seen that, and it was not so he could distinguish her. It was
by the radiant, saintlike, sweetness of her general presence. That is
again beside him and bending over him, the same as ever; and it was
certainly she! So for the few happy moments while the dream lasts;
but he awakes, and the spell is broken. So dear has been that dream,
however, that he will keep it as a sacred memory for himself in the
last of all his Sonnets:--

"Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from Death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the Old Law did save,
And such as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind.
Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But oh! as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."[1]

[Footnote 1: We do not know the exact date of this Sonnet; but the
internal evidence decidedly is that it was written not very long
after the second wife's death, and probably in 1658. The manuscript
copy of it among the Milton MSS. at Cambridge is in the hand of a
person who was certainly acting as amanuensis for Milton early in