In 1638, then thirty years old, equipped in all needed languages and scholarship, he goes for further study and observation to the Continent; he carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton; he sees the great Hugo Grotius at Paris; sees the sunny country of olives in Provence; sees the superb front of Genoa piling out from the blue waters of the Mediterranean; sees Galileo at Florence--the old philosopher too blind to study the face of the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees, too, what is best and bravest at Rome; among the rest St. Peter’s, just then brought to completion, and in the first freshness of its great tufa masonry. He is fêted by studious young Italians; has the freedom of the Accademia della Crusca; blazes out in love sonnets to some dark-eyed signorina of Bologna; returns by Venice, and by Geneva where he hobnobs with the Diodati friends of his old school-fellow, Charles Diodati; and comes home to England to find changes brewing--the Scotch marching over the border with battle-drums--the Long Parliament portending--Strafford and Laud in way of impeachment--his old father drawing near to his end--and bloody war tainting all the air. The father’s fortune, never large, is found crippled at his death; and Milton, now thirty-two, must look out for his own earnings. He takes a house; first in Fleet Street, then near Aldersgate, with garden attached, where he has three or four pupils; his nephew Phillips[58] among them. _Milton’s Marriage._ It was while living there that he brought back, one day, a bride--Mary Powell; she was a young maiden in her teens, daughter of a well-established loyalist family near to Oxford. The young bride is at the quiet student’s house in Aldersgate a month, perhaps two, when she goes down for a visit to her mother; she is to come back at Michaelmas; but Michaelmas comes, and she stays; Milton writes, and she stays; Milton writes again, and she stays; he sends a messenger--and she stays. What is up, then, in this new household? Milton, the scholar and poet, is up, straightway, to a treatise on divorce, whereby he would make it easy to undo yokes where parties are unevenly yoked. There is much scriptural support and much shrewd reasoning brought by his acuteness to the overthrow of those rulings which the common-sense of mankind has established; even now those who contend for easy divorce get their best weapons out of this old Miltonian armory. Meantime the poet went on teaching, I suspect rapping his boys over the knuckles in these days for slight cause. But what does it all mean? It means incongruity; not the first case, nor will it be the last. He--abstracted, austere, bookish, with his head in the clouds; she--with her head in ribbons, and possibly loving orderly housewifery:[59] intellectual affinities and sympathies are certainly missing. Fancy the poet just launched into the moulding of such verse as this: