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But one great work stands out, one of the greatest pieces of prose in our language, his Areopagitica defending the freedom of the press. In 1649 Milton became Foreign Secretary to Cromwell. He worked day and night writing in Latin, countless letters to foreign rulers, reading and translating their replies. As you have seen, the cause of Puritanism gained the day. Charles I was defeated and executed and Cromwell became ruler of England. But the price that Milton paid was terrible one. At the age of fourty-three, with a great work still unwritten, Milton became completely and incurably blind. The doctors had warned him some years before that if he continued with his work he ran the certain risk of going blind. He decided to go on with his work. Still further disasters came upon him. Cromwell died, and in 1660 Charles II, son of the executed Charles I, was brought back from France to be King og England. Everything that the Puritans leaders were hunted down, imprisoned, put to death. Milton, perhaps because of his blindnes, escaped death, but he left in London and retired to a little cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, about twenty miles from London. And here, lonely and blind and in disgrace, he wrote; or rather dictated to his daughters, his greatest work - the greatest long poem in the language- Paradise lost. Its vastimaginative flight takes in the boundless space of Heaven, Earth and Hell. Its subject is the fall of Lucifer (Satan) and the fall of man. It telss with tremendous power of Satan's revolt, and of the war in Heaven that followed. Satan is defeated and cast down Hell. Here in darkness and pain he forms, with the other fallen angels, a mighty empire and plans revenge. In the form of a serpent he comes to Paradise to bring evil into the world. Adam and Eva are tempted and fall and Paradise is lost.

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