if given their full effect of sound, take perhaps half as long again to read as the first six of the {217} preceding line. In any case, whatever was meant by it, the line is a most beautiful one in itself, as well as full of one of the most moving of human things, a strong man's confession that his strength does not always suffice him. These obviously autobiographical passages are to be found all through the poem. There are the stately Roman embassies coming and going in all their pomp: in which it is surely Cromwell's Foreign Secretary who sees nothing but "tedious waste of time, to sit and hear So many hollow compliments and lies, Outlandish flatteries." There is the old contempt of war and those who in virtue of their victories "swell with pride, and must be titled Gods," and of the mob who praise and admire "they know not what, And know not whom, but as one leads the other; And what delight to be by such extolled, To live upon their tongues and be their talk? Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise, His lot who dares be singularly good." There is the contempt of wealth-- "Extol not riches then, the toil of fools, The wise man's cumbrance, if not snare;" {218} a contempt which Milton shares with nearly all saints and heroes and most philosophers; a little ungratefully, perhaps, as if forgetting that, compared with the mass of men, he had himself always been rich, and that what he owed to the toil of his father had not proved in his case a snare or a cumbrance, but the necessary condition of the learning and the leisure he had used so nobly. Finally, to give no more instances, there is the confession at once so personal and so representative of the feeling of all men who have ever made the smallest effort to live well-- "Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk, Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear, And tunable as sylvan pipe or song." Who knows whether behind such words as these there lies the memory of some rapturous vision of the new world of love as St. Paul saw it, which had been cooled only too soon by humbling experience of the difficulty of "bearing all things" when all things included Salmasius, or an unthankful daughter?