Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother, till Favonius reinspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.
What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
He who of those delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.

(4)

Cyriack, whose grandsire on the royal bench
Of British Themis, with no mean applause,
Pronounced, and in his volumes taught, our laws,
Which others at their bar so often wrench,
To-day deep thoughts resolve with me to drench
In mirth that after no repenting draws;
Let Euclid rest, and Archimedes pause,
And what the Swede intend, and what the French.
To measure life learn thou betimes, and know
Toward solid good what leads the nearest way;
For other things mild Heaven a time ordains,
And disapproves that care, though wise in show,
That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.

It has been argued that the last two of these Sonnets must be out of
their proper chronological places in the printed editions. They must
have been written, it is said, before Milton lost his sight: for how
are such invitations to mirth and festivity reconcileable with
Milton's circumstances in the third or fourth year of his blindness?
There is no mistake in the matter, however. In Milton's own second
or 1673 edition of his Minor Poems the sonnets, in the order in which
we have printed them,--with the exception of No. 2, which had then to
be omitted on account of its political point,--come immediately after
the sonnet on the Piedmontese Massacre; and there are other reasons
of external evidence which assign Nos. 1, 3, and 4, distinctly to
about the same date as No. 2, the opening--words of which date
_it_ near the middle of 1655. But, indeed, we should miss much
of the biographic interest of the last two sonnets by detaching them
from the two first. In No. 1 we have a plaintive soliloquy of Milton
on his blind and disabled condition, ending with that beautiful
expression of his resignation to God's will in which, under the
image of the varieties of service that may be required by some great
monarch, he contrasts his own stationariness and inactivity with the
energy