ems to have thought that he was yielding to the allurements of
aimless study, neglecting to return as service what he had absorbed as
knowledge. Milton pleads that his motive must be higher than the love of
lettered ease, for that alone could never overcome the incentives that
urge him to action. "Why should not all the hopes that forward youth and
vanity are afledge with, together with gain, pride, and ambition, call
me forward more powerfully than a poor, regardless, and unprofitable
sin of curiosity should be able to withhold?" And what of the "desire of
honour and repute and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true
scholar?" That his correspondent may the better understand him, he
encloses a "Petrarchean sonnet," recently composed, on his twenty-third
birthday, not one of his best, but precious as the first of his frequent
reckonings with himself:--

"How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career;
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near;
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
Than some more timely-happy spirits indu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Towards which Time leads me, and the Will of Heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."

The poetical temperament is especially liable to misgiving and
despondency, and from this Milton evidently was not exempt. Yet he is
the same Milton who proclaimed a quarter of a century afterwards--

"I argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward."

There is something very fine in the steady resolution with which, after
so fully admitting to himself that his promise is yet unfulfilled, and
that appearances are against him, he recurs to his purpose, frankly
owning the while that the gift he craves is Heaven's, and his only the
application. He had received a lesson against over-confidence in the
failure of his solitary effort up to this time to achieve a work on a
large scale. To the eighth and last stanza of his poem, "The Passion of
Christ," is appended the note: "This su