EGE ON BEING ARRIVED TO THE AGE OF TWENTY-THREE lays 19 notice of a certain belatedness in me, I am the bolder to send you some of my nightward thoughts some little while ago, because they come in not altogether unfitly, made up in a Petrarchian stanza." How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year! My hasting days fly on with full ca reer, But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, That I to manhood am arrived so near, And inward ripeness doth much less appear, That some more timely-happy spirits indu'th. Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven. All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task-master's eye. e! L'ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO The initial idea of the twin poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, may be traced with considerable probability to a poem prefixed to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a book which is in the list of Milton's reading at Horton. The verses are entitled "The Author's Abstract of Melancholy; or, A Dialogue Between Pleasure and Pair 99 The following extracts will give a fair idea of them: "When I go musing all alone, Thinking of divers things foreknown, Void of sorrow, void of fear, Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet, When to myself I act and smile, With pleasing thoughts the time beguile, Here now, then there, the world is mine: An idea so congenial as this to Milton's it is true, until 1647, fifteen years after the probable date of L'Allegro and Il Pense Fountain heads and pathless groves, Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley; The scheme of contrasts in L'Allegro and Il Penseroso may also have been suggested by Burton's verses; for he gives, as a running antithesis to the pleasures of the mild contemplative type of melancholy, alternate verses dealing with the darker aspects of that mood of mind, ending with the emphatic refrain, 66 'All my griefs to this are jolly, None so damned as Melancholy." Milton has lifted this contrast to the other side of the scale, placing over against the sweetness of contemplation the sweetness of frank and open mirth and delight in the outward aspects of things. In the case of vital literature, however, such external indications of origin go at roso; but as Francis Beaumont died in 1616, best a very little way toward explaining |