"Every cloud has a silver lining" has by now become a proverb. We can thank the great John Milton for it. In his masque Comus, written in 1634, he has a scene set in a forest. Through this wild place a lady and her two brothers are travelling. They stop for a rest, and the two men set off to gather berries, leaving her ladyship on her own. They don't return and she is left all alone, frightened out of her wits as night falls. She prays to God for deliverance, and asks Faith and Hope to console her. Her prayers, she is sure, will be answered, because she is sent a promising omen: "Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud/Turn forth her silver lining on the night?/I did not err, there does a sable cloud,/Turn forth her silver lining on the night,/And cast a gleam over the rufted grove."
I suppose it's true to say that Milton's silver lining became proverbial with the help of 19th century writers, Dickens being the most famous. "I turn my silver lining outward like Milton's cloud," he wrote in Bleak House (1852).
People of my generation who had Milton on the Leaving Certificate syllabus will remember that it was he too who was responsible for the phrase "to trip the light fantastic", which has by now become a cliche, meaning to dance.
In his poem L'Allegro, written in 1632, he asks the goddess Mirth to come in dancing, accompanied by her companion Liberty: "Come, and trip it as ye go,/On the light fantastic toe."
Milton coined the word sensuous. The word sensual, found as such in Middle English (from the Late Latin sensualis, from Latin sensus, reason, judgment, understanding), had become, he felt, unsuitable for use in his pamphlets, because it applied very often to carnal passions. His creation sensuous was first seen in Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline, in 1641. I don't think he'd be pleased with the way his coinage has become confused nowadays with sensual. Would he have described Marilyn Monroe as sensuous, as the tabloids do? Absolutely not.
Yet another Milton coinage is pandemonium. Youngsters now being introduced to literary criticism by way of Dancing With Wolves would not know that Pandaemonium was Satan's capital in the epic Paradise Lost, "the citie and proud seat of Lucifer". The name was coined from the Greek pan, all, plus daemon, devil, and meant city of all the devils.