Nightingale (about 1632), professed himself a follower of Love: but if
so, he has hitherto followed at a most respectful distance. Yet he had
not erred, when in the Italian sonnet, so finely rendered in Professor
Masson's biography, he declared the heart his vulnerable point:--

"Young, gentle-natured, and a simple wooer,
Since from myself I stand in doubt to fly,
Lady, to thee my heart's poor gift would I
Offer devoutly; and by tokens sure
I know it faithful, fearless, constant, pure,
In its conceptions graceful, good, and high.
When the world roars, and flames the startled sky;
In its own adamant it rests secure;
As free from chance and malice ever found,
And fears and hopes that vulgar minds confuse,
As it is loyal to each manly thing
And to the sounding lyre and to the Muse.
Only in that part is it not so sound
Where Love hath set in it his cureless sting."

It is highly probable that the very reaction from party strife turned
the young man's fancies to thoughts of love in the spring of 1643.
Escorted, we must fear, by a chorus of mocking cuckoos, Milton, about
May 21st, rode into the country on a mysterious errand. It is a ghoulish
and ogreish idea, but it really seems as if the elder Milton quartered
his progeny upon his debtors, as the ichneumon fly quarters hers upon
caterpillars. Milton had, at all events for the last sixteen years, been
regularly drawing interest from an Oxfordshire squire, Richard Powell
of Forest Hill, who owed him £500, which must have been originally
advanced by the elder Milton. The Civil War had no doubt interfered with