He had education and leisure, freedom to think, to travel, to observe: he was more than thirty before he had to earn a mouthful of bread by his own labour.

Rushing at length into freedom's battle, he stood in its storm with his hand on the wheel of the nation's rudder, shouting many a bold word for God and the Truth, until, fulfilled of experience as of knowledge, God set up before him a canvas of utter darkness: he had to fill it with creatures of radiance.

God blinded him with his hand, that, like the nightingale, he might "sing darkling." Beyond all, his life was pure from his childhood, without which such poetry as his could never have come to the birth.

It is the pure in heart who shall see God at length; the pure in heart who now hear his harmonies.

More than all yet, he devoted himself from the first to the will of God, and his prayer that he might write a great poem was heard.
The unity of his being is the strength of Milton.