dazzling dreams of his youth and the reminiscences of his ripe age were found in him, side by side with Calvinistic dogmas and the visions of St. John, to create the Protestant epic of damnation and grace; and the vastness of primitive horizons, the flames of the infernal dungeon, the splendors of the celestial court, opened to the inner eye of the soul unknown regions beyond the sights which the eyes of the flesh had lost. Section V.--Milton as a Prose Writer [Illustration: _JOHN MILTON._ _Photogravure from an etching._ This picture of Milton, representing the great poet in the prime of his intellect, is one of the finest of him extant. Traces are still visible of that earlier beauty which at Oxford had caused him to be nicknamed the "Maiden," but the impress of serious thought has given to his face a dignity which is greater than the mere physical charm of youth. The contour of the head is noble, and the expressive, finely shaped eyes show poetic sensibility and imagination. His flowing chestnut curls are the only reminder of the gay cavalier period in which he lived, for his dress, in conformity with his sympathies, is strictly Puritan.] I have before me the formidable volume in which, some time after Milton's death, his prose works were collected.[127] What a book! The chairs creak when you place it upon them, and a man who had turned its leaves over for an hour, would have less pain in his head than in his arm. As the book, so were the men; from the mere outsides we might gather some notion of the controversialists and theologians whose doctrines they contain. Yet we must conclude that the author was eminently learned, elegant, travelled, philosophic, and a man of the world for his age. We think involuntarily of the portraits of the theologians of those days, severe faces engraved on metal by the hard artist's tool, whose square brows and steady eyes stand out in startling prominence against a dark, oak panel. We compare them to modern countenances, in which the delicate and complex features seem to quiver at the varied contact of hardly begun sensations and innumerable ideas. We try to imagine the heavy classical education, the physical exercises, the rude treatment, the rare ideas, the imposed dogmas, which formerly occupied, oppressed, fortified, and hardened the young; and we might fancy ourselves looking at an anatomy of megatheria and mastodons, reconstructed by Cuvier.