The sympathy for which you yearn shall be yours only in dreams, and you
shall be cheated of all the tenderness for which your heart prays. The
love and gentleness which you associate with your mother, you ascribe in
innocence and ignorance to all women; but Fate shall undeceive you, O John
Milton, and make mock of all your high ideals. You dote on liberty, but
liberty is not for you. You shall see the funeral of the Republic; the
defamation of your honor; the proscription of all the sacred things you
prize. Your companions shall not be of your own choosing, but shall be
those who neither know nor value the sweet, subtle mintage of the mind.
Around you mad riot shall surge, a hatred for liberty shall prevail--an
enthusiasm for slavery. The glorious leaders of your Puritan faith shall
be condemned and executed, hanged, cut down from the gallows alive, and
quartered amid the hoarse insults of the people they sought to serve; and
you yourself shall be hunted like a wild beast. You shall see the prisons
filled to overflowing with men and women whose only crime was their love
for truth. And a libertine shall sit on the throne of the England that you
love. These things you shall see with those mild, dark eyes, and then
night, eternal night, shall settle down upon you; and for those idle orbs
no day shall dawn nor starry night appear, nor face of man nor child shall
be reflected there. Your sightlessness shall give those who owe you
gratitude and love, opportunity to filch your gold; and, lastly, fire
shall rob you of your books, and well-nigh all your treasures.

Like another Lear, your daughters shall neither esteem nor respect you,
and the lines you dictate shall be to them but the idle vaporings of a
mind diseased. Your acute ears shall hear these daughters express the wish
that you were dead; and then in your blindness you will give yourself into
the keeping of a woman as dull, inane and unfeeling as the foolish child
you first chose as wife. But with it all your obstinacy shall constitute
your power; and that beauty which was yours in youth shall be with you to