hese six years at Horton is that they are
the only part of his life during which the least rural of our poets
lived continuously in the country. And perhaps we may say that they
bore their natural fruit; for it was while he was at Horton that Milton
wrote _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, in which he touched rural life
and rural scenes with a freshness and directness which he never again
equalled. And the most important of the other poems written during
these years, _Arcades_, _Comus_, and above all, _Lycidas_, show the
same influence. _Arcades_ and _Comus_ point also to the effect of his
visits to London and the musical world: for both of these were written
for the music of his friend Henry Lawes, and probably at his
suggestion; and, written as they were for entertainments given by
members of the noble families of Stanley and Egerton, they show that
Milton's plan of life did not involve cutting himself off from the
great world, where they must have caused his name to be talked of. His
life at Horton was evidently not that of a mere recluse, {42}
forgetting the world outside and forgotten by it. _Arcades_ and
_Comus_, and still more the wonderful outburst _At a Solemn Music_, are
visible links with the cultivated circles of the town, as _Lycidas_,
which followed them in 1637 and was printed in 1638 at Cambridge with
other poems to the memory of Edward King, is a visible link with his
old university.

The mention of the poems of these years, the most delightful that
Milton was ever to write, show that the six years spent at Horton were
not entirely what he calls them, "a complete holiday spent in reading
over the Greek and Latin writers." If he had never written another
line, he had written enough by the time he left Horton to give him a
place among the very greatest men who have practised the art of poetry
in England. When he started abroad in 1638 he must have known, and his
father too, that his daring choice had already justified itself. "You
ask what I am about, what I am thinking of," he writes to his friend
Diodati at the end of the Horton time; "why, with God's help, of
immortality." It is the voice of a man who knows he has already done
great things but counts them as nothing compared with what he is to do
later on.

Man proposes. In 1637 Milton was "pluming {43} his wings" for the very
mightiest of poetic flights, for such a poem as would give full scope
to his genius and place him among the great poet