ld not do it. He was
honest--stubbornly honest.

Seven years he had been at Cambridge, and now that he was just ready to
step into a "living"--right in the line of promotion of which his beauty
and intellect tokened a sure presage--he balked.

It was a great blow to his parents. His mother pleaded; his father
threatened; but they soon perceived that this son they had brought forth
had a will stronger than theirs. Their fond dreams of his preferment--the
handsome face of their boy above an oaken pulpit, with thousands feeding
on his words, the public honors, and all that--faded away into tears and
misty nothingness. But parenthood is doomed to disappointment--it does not
endure long enough to see the end. Youth is so headstrong and wilful: it
will not learn from the experience of others.

And all these years of preparation and expense! Better had he died and
been laid to rest with the three now in the churchyard.

Before Milton had served his seven years' apprenticeship at Cambridge, his
parents moved to the village of Horton--twenty miles out of London,
Windsor way.

The village of Horton has not changed much with the years, and a tramp
across the fields from Eton by way of Burnham Beeches and Stoke Pogis,
where Gray wrote "The Elegy," is quite worth while. It is a land of lazy
woods, and winding streams and hedgerows melodious with birds. One treads
on storied ground, and if you wish you can recline beneath gnarled old
oaks where Milton mused and scribbled, and wrote the first draft of "L'
Allegro" and "Il Penseroso."

Milton loitered here at Horton for six years, and in that time produced
just six poems.

He was thirty-two years of age, and had never earned a sixpence. But what
booted it! His father and mother's home was his: they gladly supplied his
every want; and his mother, especially, was ever his kindly critic and
most intimate friend. His days were spent in study, dreams, lonely walks
across green fields, and homecomings when, with his mother's hand in his,
he would talk or recite to her in order to clarify the thought that
pressed upon him. Very calm, very peaceful and very beautiful were those
days. "The pensive attitude of mind brings the best result--not the
active," he used to say. It was then he wrote to his old friend, Diodati:
"You asked what I am about--what I am thinking of? Why, with God's help, I
am thinking of immortality. Forgive the word, it is for your ear alone--I
am pluming my wings fo