He remained at Cambridge seven years. The beauty of his countenance had
increased so that he was as one set apart. His finely chiseled features,
framed in their flowing curls, challenged the admiration of every person
he met. A writer of the time described him as "a grave and sober person,
but one not wholly ignorant of his own parts."

There is a sly touch in this sentence that sheds light upon "The Lady of
Christ's." John Milton was a bit of a poseur, as Schopenhauer declares all
great men are and ever have been. With the masterly mind goes a touch of
the fakir or charlatan. Milton knew his power--he gloried in this bright
blade of the intellect. He was handsome--and he knew it. And yet we will
not cavil at his velvet coats, or laces, or the golden chain that adorned
his slender, shapely person. These things were only the transient,
springtime adornments that passion puts forth.

And yet I see that one writer mentions the chaste and ascetic quality of
Milton's early life as proof of a cold and measured nature. Seemingly the
writer does not know that intense feeling often finds a gratification in
asceticism, and that vows of chastity are proof of passion. There are many
ways of working off one's surplus energy--Milton was married to his work.
He traversed the vast fields of Classic Literature, read in the original
from Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, French, Spanish, Latin and Italian. He delved
into abstruse mathematics, studied music as a science, and labored at
theology. In fact, he came to know so much of all religions that he had
faith in none. He seemed to view religion in the cold, calculating light
of a syllogistic problem--not as a warm, pulsing motive in life. His real
religion was music, a fact he once frankly acknowledged.

On the pinions of music he was carried out and away beyond the boundaries