wonder, if you could see into me, how even what you tell me about the world
out of doors gives me more pleasure than I think I ever had when I could go
about in it just as I liked."

"It wouldn't do that, though, you know, if you hadn't had the other first.
The pleasure you have comes as much from your memory as from my news."

"I see that, papa."

"Now can you tell me anything in history that confirms what I have been
saying?"

"I don't know anything about history, papa. The only thing that comes into
my head is what you were saying yourself the other day about Milton's
blindness."

"Ah, yes. I had not thought of that. Do you know, I do believe that God
wanted a grand poem from that man, and therefore blinded him that he might
be able to write it. But he had first trained him up to the point--given
him thirty years in which he had not to provide the bread of a single day,
only to learn and think; then set him to teach boys; then placed him at
Cromwell's side, in the midst of the tumultuous movement of public affairs,
into which the late student entered with all his heart and soul; and then
last of all he cast the veil of a divine darkness over him, sent him into a
chamber far more retired than that in which he laboured at Cambridge, and
set him like the nightingale to sing darkling. The blackness about him was
just the great canvas which God gave him to cover with forms of light and
music. Deep wells of memory burst upwards from below; the windows of heaven
were opened from above; from both rushed the deluge of song which flooded
his soul, and which he has poured out in a great river to us."