"The dread voice" comes across the shepherd's dirge; the Sicilian Muse, the Muse of Theocritus, is bidden to return, but to Milton she will not come again. We think of him, at this time, as "young but intolerably severe," like Apollo in Matthew Arnold's "Empedocles on Etna". Like Wordsworth and Shelley he was devoid of humour,--and thus fails--as Shelley did not fail, thanks to his geniality, and kindness and charms--to win universal sympathy. Think of Shakespeare,--who does not love the man, and who does dare to love Milton! He was not vain with the childlike vanity of some poets, but he was as proud as his own Satan. He not only had genius next to the highest, but he knew it, tended it, cared for it, and could scarcely find a task that was great enough for his powers. We respect his self-knowledge, applaud his resolution, and are much happier with Shakespeare and Scott, who never gave a thought to their genius. On returning from Italy to his country, the country of "the Bishops' Wars," Milton, in Aldersgate Street, devoted himself to the education of his nephews, to sonnets, and then to prose works, as already mentioned, all written in the cause of sacred Liberty. He, like the old Scots Earl, did not love "the new liberty" as offered by the Presbyterian, whose name was "old priest writ large". His marriage, in 1643, to a lady of a loyal family, Mary Powell, was unhappy: she went back, in a short time, to her own people In 1645 she returned, had three daughters, and died in 1652. His private unhappiness made Milton plead vainly for freedom of divorce, a remedy which has its own unsatisfactory aspect. In 1652 Milton lost his eyesight, like his Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides, And Teiresias and Phineus, prophets old. His sonnets are his only poems of this period; when he argued for divorce, and for liberty of printing, defended the slaying of his King, wrangled with political opponents in English and Latin, and was Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth. An accomplished sonneteer in Italian, Milton in English observed, usually, the strict Petrarchian rules; and had the wisdom and self-restraint to write not too many sonnets, most of them choicely good. Even that in which he commemorates the noble Aboyne, and the son of Col of the left hand, and Gilespie Grumach is a good sonnet. He mourned for the late Massacre in Piedmont, but not for those of Drogheda and Dundee. His nobility of soul never declares itself more gloriously than in the sonnets on his blindness, of these eyes. Overplied, In Liberty's defence, my glorious task. But there was no liberty left for Anglicans, Catholics, or Presbyterians in Scotland, who were turned out of their court of General Assembly.