“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645imminent: his focus is on the transformations needed now. And, as always for Milton,
the mode of prophecy is not sudden supernatural illumination but painstaking schol-
arship and authorship:
Behold now this vast City; a City of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty... there be
pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving
new notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their fealty the
approaching Reformation: others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the
force of reason and convincement.... What wants there... but wise and faithfull
labourers, to make a knowing people, a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Wor-
thies.^132These resonant Hebraic images figure England as a New Israel that eschews uni-
formity for a higher unity. City and nation are made up of many men studying and
writing in their private chambers but through their books actively engaging with
one another – a sharp iconographic contrast to the royalist figure of the body politic
as one man with body and limbs subservient to the monarchical head, or to the later
Hobbesian figure of the sovereign containing all other bodies. Similarly, the church
is figured in terms of building the Lord’s Temple, a process requiring “many schisms
and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber,” so that the stones are
laid artfully together, “contiguous” but not cemented (555).
Then, taking on the voice of the poet–prophet as he did in Of Reformation and
Animadversions, Milton envisions England under the metaphors of the awakening
Samson or an eagle renewed to youth and power:
Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong
man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle
muing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl’d eyes at the full midday beam;
purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain it self of heav’nly radiance.
(557–8)In ringing, vehement tones, Milton proclaims in this tract his own need and right to
participate in the national and religious renewal: “Give me the liberty to know, to
utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties” (560).