"... I feel my genial spirits droop, My hopes all flat: Nature within me seems In all her functions weary of herself; My race of glory run, and race of shame, And I shall shortly be with them that rest."
Yet his indomitable spirit was by no means quenched in despair: and an outlet was now open to him at last, which for eighteen years he had foregone,--the outlet of poetic expression. He was conscious of his capacity to travel and to traverse the regions which none had dared explore save Dante. And with that tremendous chief of pioneers he was measuring himself, man to man.
He was able, above the turmoil of faction and the tumult of conflicting troubles, to weigh
"... his spread wings, at leisure to behold Far off the empyreal Heaven, extended wide In circuit, undetermined square or round, With opal towers and battlements adorned Of living sapphire, once his native seat."
That Milton had been silent for so long a period was due, firstly to his preoccupation with political and polemical questions, into which he had thrown the whole weight of his mind; and, secondly, to the effect of his own firm resolve that the great epic, which, he had always secretly intended, should be the outcome of matured and ripened powers: the apotheosis of all that was worthiest in him: the full fruit of his strenuous life. He had long since arrived at that conclusion, never surpassed in its terseness and truth, that true poetry must be "simple, sensuous, impassioned,"--words which might serve as the text and touchstone of art. "And long it was not after" when he
"was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem."
For poetry, to John Milton, was no sounding brass or tinkling cymbal; in his hand "the thing became a trumpet," apt to seraphic usages and the rallying of celestial cohorts.
Therefore, when he ceased to touch the "tender stops of various quills" that trembled into silence in _Lycidas_, it was not as one discomfited of his attainment. Rather it was as one convinced of a mighty purpose, and patiently awaiting the just time of its fulfilment. The "woodnotes wild" of _Comus_, the exquisitely stippled _genre_ painting of _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, were mere childish attempts compared with that monumental work to which Milton firmly proposed to devote the fruition of his genius. And now, having become a man through mental and physical experience even more than through the passage of years, he had put away childish things. He had resolved at last upon, and had at last undertaken, the one subject most congenial to his taste, and most suitable to his style and diction. _Paradise Lost_ was the triumphant offspring of his brain. It had sprung, like light, from chaos. Out of the darkness of poverty, blindness and defeat arose the poem which was to set him on the pinnacles of Parnassus.