Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide:
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some Beauty lies,
The Cynosure of neighbouring eyes.
Hard by a cottage chimney smokes,
From betwixt two aged oaks."

The mountains he speaks of are of course not to be seen here, but all else may be. It is pretty plain that the young poet described from what he saw. In a Latin poetical epistle he wrote at this time to Charles Diodati many of these touches occur in describing his place of residence ;-even the 'Beauty' is not left out. His residence at Horton had no little influence on the poet's future career.

In the seclusion of this lowly spot did John Milton prepare himself for the labour of his life. Milton's father had a house at Horton, and thither the young poet retired when he left the University. Five years he spent there; and in that time, as he himself has told us, he read through all the Greek and Roman classics —an amount of labour that has excited some questioning. That the time he spent at Horton was emphatically a time of preparation we know. He who would be a poet, he said, his own life must be a poem. The discipline necessary to be undergone by him who would "build the lofty rhyme," the youth Milton was not disposed to regard as a light one: and he already contemplated a flight into the highest regions of poetry. "I had," he says ('Reasons of Church Government'), "an inward prompting, which grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written as they should not willingly let it die." It was no trifling task, he knew, to add one more poem fit to rank with those of the mighty men of old, and he was not inclined to underrate the exertion necessary, or shrink from the labour of preparation. The enterprise he sought to accomplish he regarded as one requiring the severest exercise of a well-trained, as well as a strong intellect. "He meant not to write" (as Warburton says of Virgil) "for the amusement of women and children over a fire, but for the use of men and citizens." He felt, as he had already written, that

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise
(That last infirmity of noble minds)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days." "You ask me of what I am thinking," he wrote to his friend Diodati about the termination of his abode here. "As God shall help me, of immortality! But how shall I attain it? My wings are fledging, and I meditate a flight." He added, that his "Pegasus as yet soars on but feeble pinions,"—but they were flights heavenward. The choicest of his lighter pieces were all written here. That most poetical of masques, the enchanting Comus,' in which, as Johnson as truly as finely observes, "may very plainly be discovered the dawn or twilight of 'Paradise Lost ;'" the classic dirge,

'Lycidas,' and those most exquisite companions, 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso,' all were the divine fruit of his residence at Horton; and never did youthful poet breathe sweeter melody: in all of them the exuberant richness of a young imagination appears chastened. by recent reverential intercourse with the great masters of Greece and Rome, while his lyre is tuned to richest harmony by the softer genius of modern Italy.

A house is still shown as Milton's, but that in which he resided was destroyed near the close of the last century. The only relic of him that remains, and that of but doubtful authority, is the bole of an old appletree, under whose shade, there is a tradition, he was accustomed to compose.

Horton is a beautiful neighbourhood, and must have been in those days a most fitting place for the rural studies of a youthful poet. Just the place was it that would seem to have been most suitable for such a mind to undergo its initiation into the arcana of the mysteries of nature, and to prepare it for its intercourse with the stern world of human action. What a contrast must the quiet of these happy days have been to the fearful turmoil of his following years. And doubtless, in those evil days, while "In darkness, and with danger compass'd round," he often thought of the time when "He knew each lane, and every valley green, Dingle, or bushy dell of this wild wood, And every bosky bourn from side to side, His daily walks, and ancient neighbourhood."

Comus.

Horton Church will be visited by the tourist. One cannot but connect Milton with it, as we look upon its venerable ivy-mantled tower, and the two yews in the church-yard that were goodly trees when he walked under their shadow. A marble slab to the memory of the mother of Milton is the only inscription that reminds the visitor of the connection of our great poet with the place. The church itself is a very good specimen of a village church, but it has suffered somewhat from recent repairs.

The river Colne, which adds so much to the beauty of Horton, is itself a stream of more than usual interest: every part of it is more or less connected with the memories of famous men. But it is especially the river of Milton. A dozen miles above Horton is Harefield, where dwelt the Countess Dowager of Derby, at whose house Milton was a frequent visitor; and it will be recollected that his Arcades' was written as the poetic part of an entertainment to be presented before the countess "at Harefield by some noble persons of her family." But Harefield is also associated with the memory of a greater than Milton. Shakspere was here, and his 'Othello' was performed by his company, perhaps for the first time, before Queen Elizabeth in 1602. The grounds that may have inspired Milton remain, but the house which had been thus doubly honoured was burnt down in 1665: according to a tradition preserved by Lysons the fire "occasioned by the carelessness of the witty Sir Charles Sedley, who was amusing himself by reading

was