avage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores;
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.

Disappointed of all his political hopes, living on neglected and poor for
fourteen years after the Restoration, and dying a private citizen,
passably obscure, Milton yet found and took a magnanimous revenge upon
his enemies. They had crippled only his left hand in silencing the
politician, but his right hand, which had hung useless by his side for so
many years while he served the State, was his own still, and wielded a
more Olympian weapon. In prose and politics he was a baffled man, but in
poetry and vision he found his triumph. His ideas, which had gone
a-begging among the politicians of his time, were stripped by him of the
rags of circumstance, and cleansed of its dust, to be enthroned where
they might secure a hearing for all time. The surprise that he prepared
for the courtiers of the Restoration world was like Samson's revenge, in
that it fell on them from above; and, as elsewhere in the poem of _Samson
Agonistes_, Milton was thinking not very remotely of his own case when he
wrote that jubilant semi-chorus, with the marvellous fugal succession of
figures, wherein Samson, and by inference Milton himself, is compared to
a smouldering fire revived, to a serpent attacking a hen-roost, to an
eagle swooping on his helpless prey, and last, his enemies now silent for
ever, to the phoenix, self-begotten and self-perpetuating. The Philistian
nobility (or the Restoration notables) are described, with huge scorn, as
ranged along the tiers of their theatre, like barnyard fowl blinking on
their perch, watching, not without a flutter of apprehension, the vain
attempts made on their safety by the reptile grovelling in the dust
below--

But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
And as an evening dragon came,
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous