His Scholarship.

His Sonnets.

His Death and Fame.
THE BLIND POET.
Milton's blindness, his loneliness, and his loss of power, threw him upon himself.

His imagination, concentrated by these disasters and troubles, was to see higher things in a clear, celestial light: there was nothing to distract his attention, and he began that achievement which he had long before contemplated--a great religious epic, in which the heroes should be celestial beings and our sinless first parents, and the scenes Heaven, Hell, and the Paradise of a yet untainted Earth.

His first idea was to write an epic on King Arthur and his knights: it is well for the world that he changed his intention, and took as a grander subject the loss of Paradise, full as it is of individual interest to mankind.
In a consideration of his poetry, we must now first recur to those pieces which he had written at an earlier day.