ered the elms of
Charlecote chase; no passionate love affairs and wild boy-marriage.

Milton, carefully grounded in the tongues, went in due course to
Cambridge University, and during those years when the youthful mind is
in its stage of richest recipiency, lived among the kind of men who
haunt seats of learning,--on the whole, the most uninteresting men in
existence, whose very knowledge is a learned ignorance; not bees of
industry, who have hoarded information by experience, but
book-_worms_.... It is important, also, that Milton was never to any
distracting extent in love. If Shakspere had been a distinguished
university man, would he have told us of a catch that could "draw
three souls out of one weaver?" And if the boy of eighteen had not
been in a fine frenzy about Anne Hathaway, could he have known how
Juliet and Romeo, Othello and Desdemona, loved?

... It is a proof of the fiery and inextinguishable nature of Milton's
genius that it triumphed over the artificiality of his training; that
there is the pulse of a true poetical life in his most highly wrought
poems, and that the whole mountain of his learning glows with the
strong internal flame. His inspiration was from within, the
inspiration of a profound enthusiasm for beauty and an impassioned
devotion to virtue. The district in which he lived during much of his
most elaborate self-education is not marked enough to have disturbed,
by strong impressions from without, the development of his genius from
within. Horton lies where the dead flat of southeastern Buckingham
meets the dead flat of southwestern Middlesex. Egham Hill, not quite
so high as Hampstead, and the chalk knoll on which Windsor Castle
fails to be sublime, are the loftiest ground in the immediate
neighborhood. Staines, the Pontes of the Romans, and Runnymede with
its associations, are near the parish church of Horton, in which
Milton worshiped for five or six years, and in which his mother is
buried, has one of the Norman porches common in the district, but is
drearily heavy in its general structure, and forms a notable contrast
to that fine example of the old English church in which, by the
willows of Avon, lie Shakspere's bones. The river Colne breaks itself,
a few miles to the north, into a leash of streams, the most
considerable of which flows by Horton. The abounding watercourses are
veiled with willows, but the tree does not seem to have attracted
Milton's attention. It was reserved for th