I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude'; Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring! With lucky words 'favor my destined urn; And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud! Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night, Toward Heaven's descent had sloped his westering wheel. 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 beau. tiful 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 there fore so repeatedly described in all their various appearances."-T. Warton. L. 27. "We drove afield,” that is, we drove our flocks afield. I. 28. The "sultry horn,” is the sharp hum of this insect at noon. 1660-1685.] MILTON, Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven heel 35 But, O, the heavy change, now thou art gone, Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves, The willows, and hazel copses green, Shall now no more be seen, 40 Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. 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 For neither were ye playing on the steep, Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie, Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream. Ay me! I fondly dream! Had ye been there-for what could that have done? What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, ne The Muse herself, for her enchanting son, Whom universal Nature did lament, When by, the rout, that made the hideous roar,, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? To tend the homely, slighted shepherd's trade, Or with the tangles of Nera's hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise, 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," Line 50. "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 murderers are called "the rout." "Lycklas, 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 justly 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 Minclus, the celebrated streams of bucolic song, for having so suddenly departed from pastoral allusions and the tenor of his subject."-T. Warton. MILTON. Phœbus replied, and touch'd my trembling ears; Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies; But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes, And listens to the herald of the sea [CHARLES II. 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; And sage Hippotades their answer brings, The pilot of the Galilean lake; Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, (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, Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold? 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, Æotus. 115 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. L. 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. 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 That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs! 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: Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, 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 Cromwell 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 esta blished church who enjoyed fat salaries without performing any duties: who "sheared the sheep but 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 band, 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 effee' Into the cause. MILTON. To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies. Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more; [CHARLES II 155 1600 165 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; Where, other groves and other streams along, With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, 175 And hears the unexpressive nuptial song, In the bless'd kingdoms meek of joy and love. Line 154. "Ay me!" 180 185 "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. L. 160. "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, seated 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 lies, 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. |