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handed agency thought of by himself; and in that case we have not far to seek. The agency by which, three or four years afterwards, the doors of the Church of England were dashed in was an English Parliament with its two Houses; and at the time when Lycidas was written that was the agency secretly in the minds and hopes of all the Puritans. Or, if this is too prosaic as an interpretation of the prophecy before the fact, yet, as the prophecy fulfilled itself exactly so, might not Milton have known for the first time after the fact, as often happens to a prophet, the real meaning of his own symbol?— Milton, it is worth noting, had been preceded by Spenser, fifty-three years before, in this vehement denunciation of hireling shepherds in the Church, and must have had Spenser's verses in his mind. They occur in the dialogue between Palinode and Piers in the May Eclogue in The Shepheards Calender.

132-134. "Return, Alpheus," etc. For the second time there has been a burst beyond the limits of the simple Pastoral, and again he returns. This time it is not on Arethusa and Mincius that he calls, as after his first return (85, 86), but on Alpheus. Or rather it is on Alpheus and Arethusa together, both of them one now in the fountain Arethuse in the Sicilian island of Ortygia (see note Arc. 30, 31), and therefore jointly the "Sicilian Muse."

138. "the swart star": Sirius, the dog-star, which brings heat and swarthiness.

142-151. "Bring the rathe [early] primrose," etc. This is the most exquisite flower-and-colour passage in all Milton's poetry. His manuscript shows that he brought it to perfection by additions and afterthoughts.

149. "amaranthus." The name amaranth means unfading (from the Greek åμápavros), and is given to a kind of plants that last long without withering.

151. "laureate hearse." Hearse not in our modern sense of the carriage which conveys a coffin to the grave, but in the older sense of tomb, or even the coffin itself (see note to Epitaph on Marchioness of Winchester, 58).

152-154. "For so, to interpose a little ease,

Let our frail thoughts dally with false
surmise,

Ay me! whilst thee," etc.

Milton has been speaking of the "hearse" of Lycidas, and

the flowers fit to be strewn upon it in mourning, when he suddenly reminds himself that all that is but a fond fancy, inasmuch as Lycidas had perished at sea, and his body had never been recovered.

156-162. "Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides," etc. See Introd. p. 52.—“sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old," i.e. prosaically, near Land's End in Cornwall. Land's End was the Bellerium of the Romans; and Milton himself seems to have invented Bellerus as a namefather for the place, imagining him perhaps as one of the old Cornish Britons of the lineage of Corineus (see note, Comus, 826857). Indeed, as the Cambridge MS. draft of the poem shows, he had first written " Corineus," and substituted Bellerus for musical reasons. "The great Vision of the guarded mount." The "guarded mount is the steep and rocky St. Michael's Mount, opposite the town of Marazion, near Land's End, and connected with the town at low water. The Mount was famous long before Milton's time for the remains on it of an old Norman stronghold and a still older monastery, but especially for a semi-accessible craggy seat, looking out upon the sea, and called "St. Michael's Chair," because the apparition of the Archangel Michael had now and then been seen in it. He, therefore, is the "great Vision" that guards the Mount. Tourists go

to see it now, both for its old celebrity and on account of
this mention of it in Milton." Looks to Namancos and
Bayona's hold." In old maps of Spain Namancos is a town
in the province of Gallicia, near Cape Finisterre, and Bayona
is a city on the west coast of the same province.
It was a
boast of the Cornish people that there was a direct line of
sea-view from Land's End passing France altogether and
hitting no European land till it reached Spain. Drayton
had expressed this in his Polyolbion-

"Then Cornwall creepeth out into the western main,
As, lying in her eye, she pointed still at Spain."

161. "Where the great Vision of the guarded Mount." The tenth and last non-rhyming line in the poem.

163, 164. "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth:

And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth." In the first of these lines (which to me seem the worst in

the poem, and the most like a "conceit ") it is no longer Lycidas that is addressed, but the Archangel Michael. Instead of continuing his gaze over the sea to distant Spain, let him turn homeward to the nearer seas, and melt with pity for the youth there drowned. In the second line the allusion is to the legend of the lyrist Arion, who had charmed the dolphins by his singing, and was carried ashore by them when the sailors had thrown him overboard.

165-181. "Weep no more," etc. In this closing strain of the Monody, changing the grief for the loss of Lycidas into joy over the thought of his elevation into the society of Heaven, there is a close resemblance, even to identity of expression, to the closing part (lines 198-219) of the Epitaphium Damonis, written two years later.

66

173. Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves." Matt. xiv. 22-33. Note the appositeness to the whole subject of the poem in this reference to Christ's power over the waters.

176. "unexpressive," i.e. inexpressibly sweet. See Ode Nat. 116, and note there.

183, 184. "Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore," etc. Here, after a contemplation of the state of the dead Lycidas which is purely Christian and Biblical, there is a relapse into the classic manner, and Lycidas is converted into a numen.

186-193." Thus sang the uncouth swain," etc. Note the separateness of this closing stanza from the rest of the poem. It is a stanza of Epilogue, added, as it were, in Milton's own name, and distinguishing him from the imaginary shepherd, or "uncouth (i.e. unknown) swain," who has been singing the previous lament for Lycidas. That imaginary shepherd was, of course, Milton too; but in this stanza Milton looks back upon what he had written in that character, and criticises it, or at least characterises it. It had been a "Doric lay," i.e. a poem written after the fashion of the bucolic poets, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, whose dialect was the Doric variety of the Greek. Nay, in this lay "the tender stops of various quills" had been touched i.e. there had been changes of mood and metre. 192, 193. "At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.' A peculiarly picturesque ending, in which Milton announces

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that he is passing on to other occupations.

The last line seems to be an improvement upon one in Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island, published in 1633 (VI. 78):—

"Home, then, my lambs; the falling drops eschew:
To-morrow shall ye feast in pastures new."

No line of Milton's is more frequently quoted; but it is generally spoilt in the quotation by the substitution of "fields" for "woods."

SONNETS AND KINDRED PIECES.

"Warblest"

SONNET I. See note to Il Pens. 61-64. (line 2) is printed "warbl'st" in the First and Second editions, and is to be pronounced accordingly.

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SONNET II. Observe the rhymes "shew'th" and " du'th" to "youth" and "truth," and see Essay on Milton's English, p. 165.

FIVE ITALIAN SONNETS AND CANZONE. - For the subject of these pieces, and the probable date and circumstances of their composition, see Introd. to them.Farther annotation of the pieces resolves itself chiefly into a criticism of their Italian style, and a detection of the minute errors or irregularities of idiom which they may contain. The late Sir Antonio Panizzi, of the British Museum, examined them with this view in 1836 (see Gentleman's Magazine for November of that year); and the late G. Rossetti contributed some observations on them, much more severe, to Mr. Keightley's edition of Milton's poems in 1859. the whole, the conclusion is that, though Milton was an accomplished reader and student of Italian, he was not so perfect in the literary use of it but that the foreigner might be detected in some of his phrases and constructions.

On

SONNET VIII.-(Line 1) " Colonel" has to be pronounced as a trisyllable. The old English word was coronel; which, says Wedgwood, meant the captain-coronel, or chief captain; (corona, a crown). -For "charms" (line 5) see note P. L., IV. 642. “The great Emathian conqueror" is Alexander the Great, so called after Emathia, part of Macedonia; who, when he sacked the Boeotian city of Thebes and razed it to the ground (B.C. 335), ordered the house of the poet Pindar,

who had died more than a century before, to be carefully preserved. "Sad Electra's poet" is Milton's favourite Euripides, one of whose tragedies is "Electra." The story

is that, when the Spartan Lysander had taken Athens and it was proposed to destroy it utterly (B.C. 404), the victors were turned from their purpose by hearing casually repeated some verses from Euripides, then just dead.

SONNET IX.-Observe the rhyme of "Ruth," the proper name (line 5), with "ruth," the abstract noun, meaning "pity" (line 8). Such rhymes of words identical in sound and spelling, though differing in meaning, are now accounted illegitimate in English verse; but formerly they were allowed. Biblical passages in Milton's mind in the Sonnet are Matt. vii. 13; Luke x. 42; Ruth i. 14-17; Matt. XXV. 1-13, and Rom. v. 5.

SONNET X.-"that old man eloquent" is the Athenian orator and statesman Isocrates, who died B.C. 338, at the age of ninety-eight years, just after the fatal battle of Charoneia, in which Philip of Macedon defeated the Athenians and their Boeotian allies, and crushed the liberties of Greece. - later-born ... flourished. Flourished here must mean was at his best," for the Earl did not die till March 1628-9, when Milton was twenty years old.

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SONNET XI.-" Mile-end Green": a locality in Whitechapel, about the distance which its name indicates from the central parts of the City of London, and the common terminus in Milton's time of a staid citizen's walk in that direction.- 66 Gordon, Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp." These names, which Milton picks out as of no less uncouth sound than the title of his own unfortunate book, were Scottish names recently wafted into England with the news of that extraordinary Scottish episode of the great Civil War which forms the subject of Scott's Legend of Montrose. For a whole year the Marquis of Montrose had been displaying the King's standard in Scotland with a success that seemed marvellous, and that threatened at last to be very troublesome to the cause of Parliament in England; and not till Sept. 1645 had he been suppressed by the battle of Philiphaugh. As there had been much talk of him and his doings in England, the names of some of his principal followers had been in men's mouths there as well as his own. Among these followers were the Gordons of the

VOL. III.

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