Selected milton quotes

1. Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.

2. He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.

3. I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words.

4. Men of most renowned virtue have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.

5. By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.

6. Ladies, whose bright eyes Rain influence, and judge the prize.

7. And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With mask, and antique pageantry, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. Then to the well-trod stage anon, If Jonson's learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child, Warble his native wood-notes wild, And ever, against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse Such as the meeting soul may pierce, In notes with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

8. Untwisting all the chains that tie The hidden soul of harmony.

9. Oft, on a plat of rising ground, I hear the far-off curfew sound Over some wide-watered shore, Swinging low with sullen roar.

10. And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light. There let the pealing organ blow, To the full-voiced choir below, In service high, and anthems clear As may, with sweetness, through mine ear Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all heaven before mine eyes.

11. Blind mouths! That scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook.

12. Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.

13. He touch'd the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Doric lay.

14. How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year.

15. In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go out, and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth.

16. His words ... like so many nimble and airy servitors trip about him at command.

17. Yet I argue not Against Heav'n's hand or will, nor bate one jot Of heart or hope; but still bear up, and steer Right onward.

18. From haunted spring and dale Edged with poplar pale The parting genius is with sighing sent.

19. Meadows trim, with daisies pied, Shallow brooks, and rivers wide; Towers and balements it sees Bosomed high in tufted trees, Where perhaps some beauty lies, The cynosure of neighboring eyes.

20. It was that fatal and perfidious bark, Built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark, That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

21. That old man eloquent.

22. Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms, Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize, If ever deed of honour did thee please, Guard them, and him within protect from harms.

23. While the cock with lively din Scatters the rear of darkness thin, And to the stack, or the barn door, Stoutly struts his dames before, Oft list'ning how the hounds and horn Cheerly rouse the slumb'ring morn.

24. Hence vain deluding Joys, The brood of Folly without father bred!

25. Or call up him that left half told The story of Cambuscan bold.

26. Wild dreams! but such As Plato lov'd; such as with holy zeal Our Milton worshipp'd. Blessed hopes! awhile From man with-held, even to the latter days When Christ shall come, and all things be fulfill'd.

27. While [Shakespeare] darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood; [Milton] attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet ever remaining himself.

28. Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity - an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, - epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out.

29. The gadding vine.

30. Areopagitica (1644)

31. Samson Agonistes (1671)