e poet-painter of the _Liber
Studiorum_ to show what depths of homely pathos, and what exquisite
picturesqueness of gnarled and knotted line, could be found in a
pollard willow, and for Tennyson to reveal the poetic expressiveness
of the tree as denoting a solemn and pensive landscape, such as that
amid whose "willowy hills and fields" rose the carol

... mournful, holy,
Chaunted loudly, chaunted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darkened wholly,

of the Lady of Shalott....

Milton's bodily appearance at this time was in brilliant
correspondence with the ideal which imagination might form of a
youthful poet. Perfect in all bodily proportions, an accomplished
fencer, with delicate flowing hair, and beautiful features through
which genius, still half in slumber, shed its mystic glow, he was all
that the imagination of Greece saw in the young Hyperion or Apollo.

... His three daughters, Anne, Deborah, and Mary, were the children of
his first wife. He was twice married after her death in 1653, but had
no more children. So early as 1644 his sight began to fail, and when
his little girls were left motherless, they could be known to him, as
Professor Masson touchingly says, "only as tiny voices of complaint
going about in the darkness." The tiny voices did not move him to love
or pity. His impatient and imperious nature had doubtless undergone
exquisite misery from the moaning discontent of his wife; the
daughters took the mother's part so soon as they were able to
understand her sorrows; and the grave Puritan displeasure with which
Milton regards the mother seems to have been transferred to the
children. His austerity as a Puritan and a pedagogue, and the worse
than old Hebrew meanness of his estimate of women, appear to the
greatest disadvantage in connection with his daughters. Had they been
sons, he would have thrown all his ardor into the enterprise of their
education. The training of boys was one of his enthusiasms; but his
daughters were taught nothing except to read, and were ordered to read
aloud to him in languages of which they did not understand a word.
Naturally they never loved him; his fame, which they were not able to
appreciate, cast on them no ray of comforting light; and they thought
probably in sad and scared bewilderment of the relations between their
unhappy wraith-like mother, and their Titan father. How different the
warm and tender relatio