and mirth when Milton arrived back in town accompanied
by his bride and various of her kinsmen. In all marriage festivals there
is something pathetically absurd, and I never see a sidewalk awning spread
without thinking of the one erected for John Milton and Mary Powell, who
were led through it by an Erebus that was not only blind, but stone-deaf.

John Milton was an ascetic, and lived in a realm of reverie and dreams;
his wife had a strong bias toward the voluptuous, reveling in a world of
sense, and demanding attention as her right. Milton began diving into his
theories and books, and forgot the poor child who had no abstract world
into which to withdraw. Suddenly bereft of the gay companionship that her
father's house supplied, she felt herself aggrieved, alone; and tears of
vexation and homesickness began to stream down her pretty cheeks.

When summoned into her husband's presence she had nothing to say, and
Milton, the theorist, discovered that what he had mistaken for the natural
reticence and bashfulness of maidenhood was mere inanity and lack of
ideas. But the loneliness of the poor country girl, shut up in a student's
den, is a deal more touching than the scholar's wail about "the silent and
insensate" wife. The girl was being deprived of the rollicking freedom to
which she had been used, but the great man was waking the echoes with his
wail for a companionship he had never known.

Yet the girl was shrewd. All women are shrewd, I am told, and some are
wise and some are not; and many women there be who consider finesse an
improvement on frankness. At the end of a month, Milton's wife contrived
to have her parents send for her to return home on a visit that was to
last only until come Michaelmas. But Michaelmas arrived and the young
bride refused to return, sending back saucy answers to the great author of
"Il Penseroso."

In the meantime Milton wrote pamphlets urging that divorce should be
granted on the grounds of incompatibility, and pronouncing as inhuman the
laws that gave freedom from marital woes on no less ignoble grounds than
that a man should violate his honor.

There is pretty good evidence that a part of Milton's argument on the
subject of divorce was written out while his wife was under his roof. This
reveals a slight lack of delicacy as well as the author's habit to make
copy out of his private griefs; but it must be granted that Milton goes to
the very bottom of the subject, even to stating the