That capital story of _Woodstock_ one should read when they are upon these times of the Commonwealth. There are, indeed, anachronisms in it; kings escaping too early or too late, or dying a little out of time to accommodate the exigencies of the plot; but the characterization is marvellously spirited; and you see the rakehelly cavaliers, and the fine old king-ridden knights, and the sour-mouthed Independents, and the glare and fumes and madness of the civil war, as you find them in few history pages. Milton, meanwhile, in his quiet home again, revolves his old project of a great sacred poem. He taxes every visitor who can, to read to him in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch. His bookly appetite is omnivorous. His daughters have large share of this toil. Poor girls, they have been little taught, and not wisely. They read what they read only by rote, and count it severe task-work. Their mother is long since dead, and a second wife, who lived only for a short time, dead too. We know very little of that second wife; but she is embalmed forever in a sonnet, from which I steal this fragment:-- “Methought I saw my late espousèd saint Brought to me, like Alcestis from the grave; … Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin’d So clear as in no face with more delight. But oh, as to embrace me she inclined I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.” The Miltonian reading and the work goes on, but affection, I fear, does not dominate the household; the daughters overtasked, with few indulgences, make little rebellions; and the blind, exacting old man is as unforgiving as the law. Americans should take occasion to see the great picture by Munkacsy, in the Lenox Gallery, New York, of Milton dictating _Paradise Lost_; it is in itself a poem; a dim Puritan interior; light coming through a latticed window and striking on the pale, something cadaverous face of the old poet, who sits braced in his great armchair, with lips set together, and the daughters, in awed attention, listening or seeming to listen. I am sorry there is so large room to doubt of the intellectual and affectionate sympathy existing between them; nevertheless--that it did not is soberly true; his own harsh speeches, which are of record, show it; their petulant innuendoes, which are also of record, show it. Into this clouded household--over which love does not brood so fondly as we would choose to think--there comes sometimes, with helpfulness and sympathy, a certain Andrew Marvell, who had been sometime assistant to Milton in his official duties, and who takes his turn at the readings, and sees only the higher and better lights that shine there; and he had written sweet poems of his own, (to which I shall return) that have kept his name alive, and that will keep it alive, I think, forever.