Milton was then twenty-four, had been six or seven at Cambridge; did not accept kindly his father’s notion of taking orders in the Church, but had exaggerated views of a grandiose life of study and literary work; in which views his father--sensible man that he was--did not share; but--kind man that he was--he did not strongly combat them. So we find father and son living together presently, some twenty miles away from London, in a little country hamlet called Horton, where the old gentleman had purchased a cottage for a final home when his London business was closed up. Here, too, our young poet studies--not books only, borrowed where he can, and bought if he can; but studies also fields and trees and skies and rivers, and all the natural objects that are to take embalmment sooner or later in his finished verse. Here he wrote, almost within sight of Windsor towers, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” You know them; but they are always new and always fresh; freshest when you go out from London on a summer’s day to where the old tower of Horton Church still points the road, and trace there (if you can) “The russet lawns and fallows gray Where the nibbling flocks do stray, … Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks and rivers wide. … Sometimes with secure delight The upland hamlets will invite, When the merry bells ring round And the jocund rebecks sound To many a youth and many a maid Dancing in the chequered shade; And young and old come forth to play On a sunshine holiday.” In reading such verse we do not know where to stop--at least, I do not. He writes, too, in that country quietude, within sight of Windsor forest, his charming “Lycidas,” one of the loveliest of memorial poems, and the “Comus,” which alone of all the masques of that time, and preceding times, has gone in its entirety into the body of living English literature.