Divinely-warbled voice

Answering the stringed noise,

As all their souls in blissful rapture took:

The air, such pleasures loath to lose,

With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close.

The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum

XIX.

Runs through the arched roof in words leceiving.
Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er

And the resounding shore,

XX.

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent:

With flower-inwoven tresses torn,

The Nymphs, in twilight shade of tangled thickets, mourn

In consecrated earth,

And on the holy hearth,

XXI.

The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;

In urns and altars round,

A drear and dying sound

Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;

And the chill marble seems to sweat,

While each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat.

But see, the Virgin bless'd

XXVII.

Hath laid her Babe to rest;

Time is, our tedious song should here have ending:
Heaven's youngest-teemed star

Hath fix'd her polish'd car,

Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending,
And all about the courtly stable

Bright-harness'd angels sit in order serviceable.

LYCIDAS.1

In this Monody, the author bewails a learned friend, unfortunately drowned in nis passage from Chester on the Irish seas, 1637: and by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their highth.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,

Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

1 This poem was made upon the unfortunate and untimely death of Mr. Edward King, son of Su John King, Secretary for Ireland, a fellow collegian and intimate friend of Milton, who, as he was going to visit his relations in Ireland, was drowned, August 10, 1637, in the 25th year of his age. Dr Newton has observed, that Lycidas is with great judgment made of the pastoral kind, as both Mr.

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude;
And, with forced fingers rude,
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year:
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.

5

10

Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well,

15

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring!

Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night,

Oft till the star, that rose at evening, bright,

30

Toward Heaven's descent had sloped his westering wheel.
Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,

Temper'd to the oaten flute;

King and Milton had been designed for holy orders and the pastoral care, which gives a peculiar propriety to several passages in it.

Addison says, "that he who desires to know whether he has a true taste for history or not, should consider whether he is pleased with Livy's manner of telling a story; so, perhaps it may be said, that he who wishes to know whether he has a true taste for poetry or not, should consider whether he is highly delighted or not with the perusal of Milton's Lycidas.”—J. Warton.

"Whatever stern grandeur Milton's two epics and his drama, written in his latter days, exhibit; by whatever divine invention they are created; Lycidas and Comus have a fluency, a sweetness, a melody, a youthful freshness, a dewy brightness of description, which those gigantic poems have not.

The prime charm of poetry, the rapidity and the novelty, yet the natural association of beautiful ideas, is pre-eminently exhibited in Lycidas; and it strikes me, that there is no poem of Milton, in which the pastoral and rural imagery is so breathing, so brilliant, and so new as this.”—Sir Egerton Brydges.

"I shall never cease to consider this monody as the sweet effusion of a most poetic and tender mind; entitled as well by its beautiful melody as by the frequent grandeur of its sentiments and language, to the utmost enthusiasm of admiration."-Todd.

Line 3. This is a beautiful allusion to the unripe age of his friend, in which death "shatter'd his leaves before the mellowing year."

L. 15. "The sacred well," Helicon.

L. 25. "From the regularity of his pursuits, the purity of his pleasures, his temperance, and general simplicity of life, Milton habitually became an early riser; hence he gained an acquaintance with the beauties of the morning, which he so frequently contemplated with delight, and has therefore so repeatedly described in all their various appearances."-T. Warton.

L 27. "We drove afield," that is, we drove our flocks afield.

28. The "sultry horn," is the sharp hum of this insect at noon.

Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven heel
From the glad sound would not be absent long;
And old Damætas loved to hear our song.

But, O, the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!

Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves,

With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown,
And all their echoes mourn:

The willows, and hazel copses green,

Shall now no more be seen,

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.

35

40

As killing as the canker to the rose,

45

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,

Or frost to flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear,

When first the white-thorn blows;

Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear.

Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep

50

Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?

For neither were ye playing on the steep,

Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,

Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,

Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream.

55

Ay me! I fondly dream!

Had ye been there for what could that have done?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,
(That last infirmity of noble mind)

70

Line 50.

To scorn delights, and live laborious days;
But the fair guerdon when we hope to find,
And think to burst out into sudden blaze,
Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.
"But not the praise,"

75

"Where were ye?" "This burst is as magnificent as it is affecting."—Sir E. Brydges. L. 58. Reference is here made to Orpheus, torn in pieces by the Bacchanalians, whose murdere.s are called "the rout." "Lycidas, as a poet, is here tacitly compared with Orpheus: they were both also victims of the water."-T. Warton.

L. 70, &c. "No lines have been more often cited, and more popular than these; nor more justy Instructive and inspiriting.”—Sir Egerton Brydges.

L. 76. "But not the praise;" that is, but the praise is not intercepted. "While the poet, in the character of a shepherd, is moralizing on the uncertainty of human life, Phoebus interposes with a sublime strain, above the tone of pastoral poetry: he then, in an abrupt and elliptical apostrophe, at 'O fountain Arethuse; hastily recollects himself, and apologizes to his rural Muse, or in other words to Arethusa and Mincius, the celebrated streams of bucolic song, for having so suddenly departed from pastoral allusions and the tenor of h's subject."-T. Warton.

Phoebus replied, and touch'd my trembling ears;
"Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies;
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove:
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,

Of so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed."
O fountain Arethuse, and thou honor'd flood,
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood:
But now my oat proceeds,

And listens to the herald of the sea

That came in Neptune's plea :

80

85

90

He ask'd the waves, and ask'd the felon winds,

What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain?
And question'd every gust of rugged wings
That blows from off each beaked promontory:
They knew not of his story;

95

And sage Hippotades their answer brings,
That not a blast was from his dungeon stray'd;
The air was calm, and on the level brine
Sleek Panope with all her sisters play'd;
It was that fatal and perfidious bark,

100

Built in the eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,

His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge

105

Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.

Ah! who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?

Last came, and last did go,

The pilot of the Galilean lake;

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,

110

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,)

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake:

How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,
Enow of such, as for their bellies' sake
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold?

115

Line 91. "The felon winds," that is, the cruel winds.

L. 94. "A beaked promontory" is one projecting like the beak of a bird.

L. 96. "Hippotades," a patronymic noun, the son of Hippotas, that is, Æolus.

L. 101. The shipwreck was occasioned not by a storm, but by the ship's being unfit for such a navigation. L. 103. "Camus." This is the river Cam, on the borders of which was the University of Cambridge, where Lycidas was educated.

L. 104. The "hairy mantle" joined with the "sedge bonnet" may mean the rushy or reedy banks of the Cam; and the "figures dim" refer, it is thought, to the indistinct and dusky streaks on sedge leaves or flags when dried.

L. 109. "The pilot of the Galilean lake," the apostle Peter.

I.. 114. He here animadverts on the endowments of the church, at the same time Insinuating that they were shared by those only who sought the emoluments of the sacred office, to the exclusion of a learned and conscientious clergy. Thus in Paradise Lost, iv. 193, alluding to Satan, he says:

So clomb this first grand thief into God's fold;

So since into his church lewd hirelings climb.

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
That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs!

120

What recks it them? What need they? They are sed;

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
Daily devours apace, and nothing sed:
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks;
Throw hither all your quaint enamell'd eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,

The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears:
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,

So, in his sixteenth Sonnet, written in 1652, he supplicates C. omwell

To save free conscience from the paw

Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.

130

135

140

145

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 muse 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 into the cause