To thee, dear lady, with an humble sigh, * Milton was three times married. The relations of his first wife, (Mary Powell,) who were violent Royalists, and ashamed or afraid of their connection with a republican, persuaded her to leave him. She absolutely forsook her husband for nearly three years, and resided with her family at Oxford, when that city was the head-quarters of the King's party. "I have so much charity for her," says Aubrey," that she might not wrong his bed; but what man (especially contemplative,) would like to have a young wife environed and stormed by the sons of Mars, and those of the ennemie partie ?" Milton, though a suspicion of the nature hinted at by Aubrey never rose in his mind, was justly incensed at this dereliction. He was on the point of divorcing this contumacious bride, and had already made choice of another* to succeed her, Miss Davies. "The father (says Hayley) seems to have been a convert to Milton's arguments; but the lady had scruples when she threw herself, impromptu, at his feet and implored his forgiveness. He forgave her: and when the republican party triumphed, the family who had so cruelly wronged him found a refuge in his house. This woman embittered his life for fourteen or fifteen years. A remembrance of the reconciliation with his wife, and of his own feelings on that occasion, are said to have suggested to Milton's mind the beautiful scene between Adam and Eve, in the tenth book of the Paradise Lost. She ended weeping? and her lowly plight, Milton's second and most beloved wife (Catherine Woodcock) died in childbed, within a year after their marriage. He honored her memory with what Johnson (out upon him!) calls a poor sonnet; it is the one beginning She possessed (according to Phillips) both wit and beauty. A novelist could hardly imagine circumstances more singularly distressing to sensibility than the situation of the poet, if, as we may reasonably conjecture, he was deeply enamored of this lady; if her father was inclined to accept him as a son-in-law, and the object of his love had no inclination to reject his suit, but what arose from a dread of his being indissolubly united to another." Life of Milton, p. 90. Methought I saw my late espoused saint which, in its solemn and tender strain of feeling and modulated harmony, reminds us of Dante. He never ceased to lament her, and to cherish her memory with a fond regret :—she must have been full in his heart and mind when he wrote those touching lines in the Paradise Lost How can I live without thee? how forego After her death,-blind, disconsolate, and helpless he was abandoned to petty wrongs and domestic discord; and suffered from the disobedience and unkindness of his two elder daughters, like another Lear. His youngest daughter, Deborah, was the only one who acted as his amanuensis, and she always spoke of him with extreme affection;-on being suddenly shown his picture, twenty years after his death, she burst into tears. These three daughters were grown up, and the youngest about fifteen, when Milton married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull. She was a gentle, kind-hearted woman, without pretensions of any kind, who watched over his declining years with affectionate care. One biographer has not scrupled to assert, that to her,--or rather to her tender reverence for his studious habits, and to the peace and comfort she brought to his heart and home,— we owe the Paradise Lost: if true, what a debt immense of endless gratitude is due to the memory of this unobtrusive and amiable woman! CHAPTER XX. CAREW'S CELIA.-LUCY SACHEVEREL. FROM the reign of Charles the First may be dated that revolution in the spirit and form of our ⚫lyric poetry, which led to its subsequent degradation. The first Italian school of poetry, to which we owed our Surreys, our Spensers, and our Milton's, had now declined.. The high contemplative tone of passion, the magnanimous and chivalrous homage paid to women, gradually gave way before the French taste and French gallantry, introduced, or at least encouraged and rendered fashionable, by Henrietta Maria and her gay household. The muse of amatory poetry (I presume there is such a Muse, though I know not to which of the Nine the title properly applies) no longer walked the earth star-crowned and vestal-robed, "col dir pienď intelletti, dolci ed alti,"-" with love upon her lips, and looks commercing with the skies; "-she suited her garb to the fashion of the times, and tripped along in guise of an Arcadian princess, half regal, half pastoral, trailing a sheep-hook crowned with flowers, and sparkling with foreign ornaments, Pale glistening pearls and rainbow-colored gems. Then in the "brisk and giddy-paced times" of Charles the Second, she flaunted an airy coquette, or an unblushing courtesan, (" unveiled her eyes, -unclasped her zone;") and when these sinful doings were banished, she took the hue of the new morals-new fashions-new manners, and we find her a court prude, swimming in a hoop and red-heeled shoes, "conscious of the rich brocade," and ogling behind her fan: or else in the opposite extreme, like a bergère in a French ballet, stuck over with sentimental common-places and artificial® flowers. This, in general terms, was the progress of the lyric muse, from the poets of Queen Elizabeth's days down to the wits of Queen Anne's. Of course, there are modifications and exceptions, which will suggest themselves to the poetical reader; but it does not enter into the plan of this sketch to treat matters thus critically and profoundly. To return then to the days of Charles the First. It must be confessed that the union of Italian sentiment and imagination with French vivacity and gallantry, was, in the commencement, exceedingly graceful, before all poetry was lost in wit, and gallantry sunk into licentiousness. |