Of other care they little reckoning make, Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, And shove away the worthy bidden guest! Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else the least 120 What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw: The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed; 125 But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread: Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 130 135 140 The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, 145 The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, So, in his sixteenth Sonnet, written in 1652, he supplicates Comwell To save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw. 150 Line 124. "Scrannel" is thin, lean, meagre. "A scrannel pipe of straw is contemptuously used for Virgil's 'tenuis avena.'"-T. Warton. L. 129. "Nothing said." By this Milton clearly alludes to those prelates and clergy of the established church who enjoyed fat salaries without performing any duties: who "sheared the sheep bu: did not feed them." L. 130, 131. "In these lines our author anticipates the execution of Archbishop Laud by a 'twohanded engine,' that is, the axe; insinuating that his death would remove all grievances in religion, and complete the reformation of the church."-T. Warton. The sense of the passage is, "But there will soon be an end of these evils; the axe is at hand, to take off the head of him who has been the great abettor of these corruptions of the gospel. This will be done by one stroke." L. 133. That shrunk thy streams," that is, that silenced my pastoral poetry. The Sicilian musa is now to return with all her store of rural imagery. "The imagery here is from the noblest source."--Brydges. L. 136. "Use," in the sense of to haunt, to inhabit. See Halliwell's "Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words," 2 vols. 8vo. L. 138. "Swart" is swarthy, brown. The dog-star is called the "swart-star," by turning the effect to the canse To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Look homeward, angel, now, and melt with ruth: For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, 155 160 165 Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more; Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor: So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore 170 Flames in the forehead of the morning sky: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of Him that walk'd the waves; Line 154. "Ay me!" "Here," Mr. Dunster observes, "the burst of grief is infinitely beautiful, when properly connected with what precedes it and to which it refers." L. 158. "Monstrous world," that is, the sea, the world of monsters. "Bellerus," the name of a Cornish giant. On the southwestern shores of Cornwall there Is a stupendous pile of rock-work called the "giant's chair;" and not far from Land's End is another most romantic projection of rock called St. Michael's Mount. There was a tradition that the "Vision" of St. Michael, scated on this crag, appeared to some hermits. The sense of this line and the following, taken with the preceding, is this:-"Let every flower be strewed on the hearse where Lycidas ties, so to flatter ourselves for a moment with the notion that his corpse is present; and this, (ah me!) while the seas are wafting it here and there, whether beyond the Hebrides or near the shores of Cornwall, &c." L. 162. "Namancos" is marked in the early editions of Mercator's Atlas as in Gallicia, on the northwest coast of Spain, near Cape Finisterre. Bayona is the strong castle of the French, in the southwestern extremity of France, near the Pyrenees. In that same atlas this castle makes a very conspicuous figure. L. 163. "Here is an apostrophe to the angel Michael, seated on the guarded mount. 'Oh angel, look no longer seaward to Namancos and Bayona's hold: rather turn your eyes to another object: look homeward or landward; look towards your own coast now, and view with pity the corpse of the shipwrecked Lycidas floating thither.'"-T. Warton. L. 181 "And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes."-Isa. xxv. 8; Rev. vii. 17. Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills, SCENE FROM COMUS.1 A wild wood. The lady enters. Lady. This way the noise was, if mine ear be true, Such as the jocund flute, or gamesome pipe, When for their teeming flocks and granges full, In the blind mazes of this tangled wood? 190 L. 188. By "stops" Milton here means what we now call the holes of a flute or any species of pipe. L. 189. This is a Doric lay, because Theocritus and Moschus had respectively written a bucolic on the deaths of Daphnis and Bion. 1 The fable of Comus is this. A beautiful lady, attended by her two brothers, is journeying through a dreary wood. The brothers become separated from their sister, who is met by Comus, the god of low pleasures, who, with his followers, holds his orgies in the night. He addresses her in the disguised character of a peasant, but she resists all his arts, and Comus and his crew are put to flight by the brothers, who come in time to rescue their sister. The object of the poem is to show the full power of true virtue and chastity to triumph over all the assaults of wickedness; or, in the language of Shakspeare That virtue never will be moved, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven. "Comus," says Sir Egerton Brydges, "is the invention of a beautiful fable, enriched with shadowy beings and visionary delights: every line and word is pure poetry, and the sentiments are as exquisite as the images. It is a composition which no pen but Milton's could have produced." It seems that an accidental event which occurred to the family of Milton's patron, John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, then keeping his court at Ludlow castle, gave birth to this fable. The earl's two sons and daughter, Lady Alice, were benighted, and lost their way in Heywood-forest; and the two brothers, in the attempt to explore their path, left the sister alone, in a track of country rudely inhabited. On these simple facts the poet raised a superstructure of such fairy spells and poetical delight as has never since been equalled. 2 Wanzil, from the Anglo-Saxon was hæl, "be in health." It was anciently the pledge word in drinking, equivalent to the modern "your health." The bowl in which the liquor was presented was called the wassail-bowl, and as it was peculiar to scenes of revelry and festivity, the term wassall in time became synonymous with feasting and carousing. Thus, in Shakspeare, Lady Macbeth de clares that she will "convince (that is, overpower) the two chamberlains of Duncan with wine and we;" and Ben Jonson, giving an account of a rural feast, says: The rout of rural folk come thronging in, And in their cups their cares are drown'd. I cannot halloo to my brothers, but Song.1 Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that livest unseen By slow Meander's margent green, Where the love-lorn nightingale Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well; That likest thy Narcissus are? O if thou have Hid them in some flowery cave, Tell me but where, Sweet queen of parley, daughter of the sphere! And give resounding grace to all heaven's harmonies. Enter Comus. Comus. Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould How sweetly did they float upon the wings And chid her barking waves into attention, I never heard till now.-I'll speak to her, And she shall be my queen.-Hail, foreign wonder! 2 Unless the goddess that in rural shrine Dwell'st here with Pan, or Sylvan; by blest song 1 "The songs of this poem are of a singular felicity; they are unbroken streams of exquisite ima very, either imaginative or descriptive, with a dance of numbers which sounds like aërial music: for Instance, the Lady's song to Echo."-Brydges. 2 "Comus's address to the lady is exceedingly beautiful in every respect; but all readers will acknowledge that the style of it is much raised by the expression 'unless the goddess,' an elliptical expression, unusual in our language, though common enough in Greek and Latin. But if we were to fill it up and say, 'unless thou beest the go idess,' how flat and insipid would it make the composition, compared with what it is."--Lord Mondoddo. Forbidding every bleak unkindly fog To touch the prosperous growth of this tall wood. Not any boast of skill, but extreme shift Compell'd me to awake the courteous Echo To give me answer from her mossy couch. Com. What chance, good lady, hath bereft you thus? Lady. Dim darkness, and this leavie labyrinth. Com. Could that divide you from near-ushering guides? Lady. To seek i' the valley some cool friendly spring. Com. Imports their loss, beside the present need? Of some gay creatures of the element, That in the colors of the rainbow live, And play in the plighted clouds. I was awe-struck, Lady. Gentle villager, What readiest way would bring me to that place? Would overtask the best land-pilot's art, Without the sure guess of well-practised feet. Com. I know each lane, and every alley green, But loyal cottage, where you may be safe 1 "Swink'd," I. e. tired, fatigued. |