Yet not alone among "forms and faces" was he predestined to discover that Absolute Beauty. The passionate love of music, so frequently characteristic of a great linguist, which led him into sound-worlds as well as sight-worlds, was fated to remain with him, an incalculable consolation, when "forms and faces" could be no more seen. And into the vocabulary of _Paradise Lost_, that incomparably rich vocabulary, with its infallible ear for rhythm, for phrase, for magnificent consonantal effects and the magic of great names that reverberate through open vowels,--into this he poured forth his whole sense of beautiful sound, "as the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid, Tunes her nocturnal note." _Paradise Lost_ remains, as has been observed, "The elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry--the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of all past time, equally magnificent in verbiage, whether describing man, or God, or the Arch-Enemy visiting" this pendent world, when Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge, Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he lives. At seven o'clock the body-servant Greene re-entered, followed by Mrs. Milton, the poet's third wife, and by Mary Fisher, their maid-servant, bringing in his breakfast, a light, slight repast. Mrs. Milton, _née_ Elizabeth Minshull, of Nantwich, was a comely, active, capable woman, "of a peaceful and agreeable humour," so far at least as her husband was concerned: for she shared the traditional destiny of a stepmother in not "hitting it off" with the first wife's daughters. Her golden hair and calm commonsense were in striking contrast, alike with the dark beauty and petulant spirit of Mary Powell, and with the fragile sweetness of Catherine Woodcock, Milton's former spouses. If she did not in her heart confirm her husband's celebrated theory of the relative position of man and wife,--"He for God only, she for God in him,"--(which, it has been said, "condenses every fallacy about woman's true relation to her husband and to her Maker"), she managed very adroitly to convey an impression of entire acquiescence in the will of her lord. And at least she was entirely adequate as a housewife. Had Milton ever encountered that "not impossible She" whom he portrayed in his ideal Eve? or was this latter a mere visionary abstract of great qualities, "to show us how divine a thing a woman may be made"? Neither of his three wives, nor yet that "very handsome and witty gentlewoman," Miss Davis, to whom he had at one time paid his addresses, conformed to this description: one cannot even conjecture that it was a _pasticcio_ of their respective fine attributes.