“Religion stands a-tiptoe in our land,

Ready to pass to the American strand,"

Herbert had written in one of his poems as early as 1632; and the words, used by Herbert in a sense of his own, were taken up

and repeated by the Puritans. In the end, as we shall see, Laud was to exert himself in this matter too, and to try to coerce the American Church, or at least prevent its increase; but, on the whole, whoever, about the year 1632, desired liberty of conscience, could have it in full measure across the Atlantic. Alas! at what a cost ! Where now the great American Republic receives the ships of the world into its northern harbors, these few hundreds of outcast Puritans, the first founders of its strength, had to raise their psalms of thanksgiving on bleak and unknown headlands, amid cold and hunger and ague, the graves of their little ones who had perished lying around them, Red Indians hovering near on the one side, and, on the other side, the eternal sea-line which severed them from dear cruel England, and the long low plash of the sullen waves.

“Church-outed by the prelates” at home, and not so zealously bent on the ministerial office as to embrace any of those alter- ! natives by which his contemporaries in similar circumstances were enabled to pursue that office out of the sway of prelacy, Milton had to resolve on some totally distinct course of life. There is evidence in several allusions in his subsequent writings, that he at least thought of the profession of the law. But though the

thought may have occasionally recurred in his mind for a year or two after the date of his leaving college, he took, so far as appears, no definite steps towards fulfilling it. Leaving it for his brother Christopher to become the lawyer of the family, he obtained his father's consent, as regarded himself, to a life of very different prospects-to wit, a life of continued study, without any professional end whatever, though with the possibility of authorship or some other public application of his powers in the distance.

That Milton, before leaving college, had had dreams of a literary career, we have already seen. In his letter to a friend, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, there are hints of some such ambition lurking under his hesitations to enter the Church. In a later reference, however, to this period of his life, he seems to reveal more distinctly the nature of his then but half-formed speculations as to his future mode of life. Speaking of the care bestowed on his education, both at home and at the University, he says: "It was found that, whether aught was imposed upon me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of my own choice, in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live." The interpretation of this seems to be, that already in 1632, on the faith of the acknowledged success of such compositions of his in Latin and English as he had produced prior to that time, whether as college exercises or for his own recreation, he himself felt, and his friends felt too, that he had a vocation to authorship and especially to poetry. It may be well here to take stock of the little collection of pieces (all already individually known to us) on which this judgment was formed:

I. LATIN: (1.) In Prose, the first four of his "Familiar Epistles" or "Epistolæ Familiares". - the first written in 1625, and the other three in • 1628; and the seven College Themes or Exercises, entitled "Prolusiones quædam Oratoriæ," of which an account has been given. (2.) In Verse, seventeen separate pieces, now printed in his works' as follows:

7. The Elegy beginning, "Nondum blanda tuas leges Amathusis nôram:" 1628.

II. The first five of the pieces, in different kinds of verse, forming the so-called "Sylvarum Liber," or "Book of Sylvæ:" viz.:

1. "In Obitum Procancellarii Medici:" 1626.

2. "In quintum Novembris:" 1626.

3. "In Obitum Præsulis Eliensis:" 1626.

4. "Naturam non pati senium:" 1628.

5. "De Idea Platonicâ quemadmodum Aristoteles intellexit."

III. The first five brief scraps in elegiac verse, in the "Epigrammatum
Liber," or "Book of Epigrams:" viz.:

1. "In Proditionem Bombardicam:" "On the Gunpowder

Treason."

2. "In Eandem."

3. "In Eandem."

4. "In Eandem."

5. "In Inventorem Bombardæ:" "On the Inventor of Gun

powder."

II. ENGLISH: With the exception of one letter to a friend, all the English remains of this period are in verse. They are fifteen pieces in all, as follows:

1. The Translations of Psalms CXIV. and CXXXVI.: 1624.

11. The following miscellaneous poems:

1. "On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a cough:" 1626.

2. "At a Vacation Exercise at College:" 1628.

3. "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," with "The Hymn: "

1629.

4. "The Passion:" 1630 (?)

5. "On Time:" 1630. (?)

6. "Upon the Circumcision:" 1630. (?)

7. "At a Solemn Musick:" 1630. (?)

8. "Song; On May Morning:" 1630. (?)

9. "On Shakspeare:" 1630.

10. "On the University Carrier:" 1630-31.

11. "Another on the same:"1630-31.

12. "An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester:" 1631.

III. Sonnet "On his being arrived to the age of twenty-three: " Dec.

1631.

These pieces, if printed, would have made a sufficient little volume. Only two of them, however, had as yet found their way into typethe Latin lines "Naturam non pati senium," privately and anonymously printed in Cambridge, for the Commencement of 1628; and the English epitaph "On Shakespeare," prefixed, but without the author's name or initials, to the Folio Shakspeare of 1632. All the rest were still in manuscript; and it was from the perusal of them in that uncomfortable state, that Milton's friends had come to the conclusion which he records.

One person naturally demurred to the conclusion, or at least to the practical result of it-the poet's good old father. That his son, the son of his hopes, should now, in his twenty-fourth year, after acquiring all that school and college could give, not only abandon his destined profession of the Church, but propose nothing else for himself instead than a continued life of literature, could hardly but disturb him. There seem to have been conversations on the subject — the usual reasonings between the father, who is a man of business, and the son who will be a poet. In this case, however, both father and son were such that the controversy was but a short one, and terminated indulgently. So much we gather from Milton's Latin poem “Ad Patrem," not dated, but certainly written about this time. Here are parts of the poem in prose translation :

“Do not, I pray, continue to contemn the sacred Muses, nor think those powers vain and poor by whose gift thou thyself art skilled to compose a thousand sounds to apt metres, and, taught to vary the sounding voice with a thousand modulations, art deservedly the heir of Arion's name. Why now should it surprise thee if it should chance that thou hast begotten a poet in me, and if, joined so near by dear blood, we should follow cognate arts and a kindred study? Phæbus, wishing to part himself between the two, has given me the one set of gifts, has given my father the other; sire and son, we hold between us the whole divided god. Nay, though you profess to hate the tender Muses, I do not believe that you hate them. For thou didst not, my father, bid me go where the broad way is open, the ready mart of exchange where there shines the sure and golden hope of heaping up coin; nor dost thou whirl (present tense, “nec rapis”) me on to the laws and the ill-kept rights of nations, and condemn my ears to silly clamours; but desiring rather to enrich my mind by cultivation, thou allowest me, far from the noise of town, and shut up in deep retreats, to wander, a happy companion by Apollo's side, through the leisured sweetness of Aonian glades. * * Go now, gather wealth, whosoever thou art that preferrest the ancestral treasures of the Austrian, the silver realms of Peru! What greater wealth could father have bestowed, or Jove himself, though he had bestowed all, heaven excepted? Better were not the gifts, even had they been safe, of him who entrusted the public light of the world to his stripling son, the chariot of Hyperion, the reins of Day, the tiara glittering round with radiant gleams. Therefore will I, though as yet but tie lowest member of the learned throng, take my seat now among the victorious ivy-wreaths and laurels: and no longer shall I be mixed obscure with the inactive crowd; and my footsteps shall avoid the eyes of the profane. Be far off, watchful cares; be far off, all quarrels, and the face of Envy writhing with eye askance! * * But, for thee, dear father, since it is not given me to be able to tell all thy deserts, nor

to repay thy gifts by acts, be it enough to have recorded them, and thoroughly to appreciate them in my grateful mind as I rehearse them, and to lay them up in faithful remembrance. And ye, youthful verses, my sport and amusement, if ye might but dare to hope for perpetual existence, and to survive the pyre of your master and behold the light, not dragged into black oblivion under thick Orcus, perhaps ye will preserve to a late age, for an example to others, these praises of my father, and his name thus sung!”

From certain words of Milton's, already quoted, it appears that the fellows of Christ's College would have been glad if he had continued to reside amongst them, so as to carry on his studies with those facilities of access to books and the like which the University afforded. By this time, however, his father had retired from business altogether, and was living on his modest fortune in the little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire; and thither Milton removed, to fulfil in greater seclusion his design of preparing himself for some part in contemporary British literature. It will be the purpose of the next chapter to describe the element on which he had determined to embark.