“Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire Mirth and youth, and warm desire! Woods and groves are of thy dressing----” when a servant gives sharp rat-tat at the door, “Please, sir, missus says, ‘Dinner’s waiting!’” But the poet sweeps on-- “O nightingale, that on yon blooming spray Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still, Thou, with fresh heat, the lover’s heart dost fill, Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate----” And there is another rat-tat!--“Please, sir, missus says, ‘Dinner is all getting cold.’” Still the poet ranges in fairyland-- “----ere the rude bird of hate Foretell my hopeless doom, in some grove nigh, As thou from year to year hast sung too late For my relief, yet hadst no reason why----” And now, maybe, it is the pretty mistress who comes with a bounce--“Mr. Milton, are you _ever_ coming?”--and a quick bang of the door, which is a way some excellent petulant young women have of--not breaking the commandments. There is a little prosaic half-line in the “Paradise Lost” (I don’t think it was ever quoted before), which in this connection seems to me to have a very pathetic twang in it; ’tis about Paradise and its charms-- “No fear lest dinner cool!” However, it happens that through the advocacy of friends on both sides this great family breach is healed, or seems to be; and two years after, Milton and his recreant, penitent, and restored wife are living again together; lived together till her death; and she became the mother of his three daughters: Anne, who was crippled, never even learned to write, and used to be occupied with her needle; Mary, who was his amanuensis and reader most times, and Deborah, the youngest, who came to perform similar offices for him afterward. Meantime the Royalist cause had suffered everywhere. The Powells (his wife’s family having come to disaster) did--with more or less children--go to live with Milton. Whether the presence of the mother-in-law mended the poet’s domesticity I doubt; doubt, indeed, if ever there was absolute harmony there. On the year of the battle of Naseby appeared Milton’s first unpretending booklet of poems,[60] containing with others, those already named, and not before printed. Earlier, however, in the lifetime of the poet had begun the issue of those thunderbolts of pamphlets which he wrote on church discipline, education, on the liberty of unlicensed printing, and many another topic--cumbrous with great trails of intricate sentences, wondrous word-heaps, sparkling with learning, flaming with anger--with convolutions like a serpent’s, and as biting as serpents.