Ellwood's narrative tells its own story. What especially strikes us in
it, and what makes it particularly interesting, is that it presents
Milton in a light in which he is not presented elsewhere. Ellwood seems
to have had the same attraction for him as Bonstetten had for Gray. No
doubt the simplicity, freshness, and enthusiasm of the young Quaker
touched and interested the lonely and world-wearied poet who, when
Ellwood first met him, had entered on his fifty-fifth year; he had no
doubt, too, the scholar's sympathy with a disinterested love of learning.
In any case, but for Ellwood, we should never have known the softer side
of Milton's character, never have known of what gentleness, patience, and
courtesy he was capable. And, indeed, when we remember Milton's position
at this time, as tragical as that of Demosthenes after Chaeronea, and of
Dante at the Court of Verona, there is something inexpressibly touching
in the picture here given with so much simplicity and with such evident
unconsciousness on the part of the painter of the effect produced. There
is one passage which is quite delicious, and yet its point may be, as it
commonly is, easily missed. It illustrates the density of Ellwood's
stupidity, and the delicate irony of the sadly courteous poet. Milton had
lent him, it will be seen, the manuscript of _Paradise Lost_; and on
Ellwood returning it to him, 'he asked me how I liked it, and what I
thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him, and after some
further discourse about it I pleasantly said to him, "Thou has said much
here of Paradise Lost, but what has thou to say of Paradise Found?"' Now
the whole point and scope of Paradise Lost is Paradise Found--the
redemption--the substitution of a spiritual Eden within man for a
physical Eden without man, a point emphasised in the invocation, and
elaborately worked out in the closing vision from the Specular Mount. It
is easy to understand the significance of what follows: 'He made me no
answer, but sat sometime in a muse; then broke off that discourse, and
fell upon another subject.' The result no doubt of that 'muse' was the