Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arriv'd so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely happy spirits endu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean, or high,
Toward which Time leads me; and the Will of Heaven;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-Master's eye."
Yet dissatisfied as he sometimes was, he was very sure of
himself, and for five years he let his wings grow, as he himself
said. But these years were not altogether lost, for if both day
and night Milton roamed the meadows about his home in seeming
idleness, he was drinking in all the beauty of earth and sky,
flower and field, storing his memory with sights and sounds that
were to be a treasure to him in after days. He studied hard,
too, ranging at will through Greek and Latin literature. "No
delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything holds me
aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it
were, some great period of my studies," he says to a friend.
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