ever thou enterest the starry dome of Heaven, only through flame shall the sorry way lie open." O how near the awful truth did you speak! A little more, and the words had not lacked their weight. For almost he went, rolled high by Tartarean fire, a burnt shade, to the upper shores. ON THE SAME HIM whom impious Rome had vowed to her own Furies, whom she had damned to Styx and the Tænarian gulf, him, contrarywise, she now longs to send to the stars, and seeks to exalt him to the gods on high. ON THE INVENTOR of Gunpowder BLIND antiquity praised Prometheus, who brought the heavenly torch from the sun; but for me he shall be greater who stole from Jove his lurid arms and threeforked thunderbolt. TO LEONORA, SINGING To every man his angel is allotted (believe it, ye people!), his winged angel from the ethereal hierarchies. What wonder, Leonora, if a greater glory be yours? For your very voice sounds the present God. Either God himself, or surely at least the third Mind emptying Heaven of itself, thrills mysteriously through your throat; thrills, suavely accustoming mortal hearts by tender degrees to immortal sounds. Yea, if all things be God, and He be transfused through all, yet in you alone He speaks, the rest He possesses in silence. TO THE SAME ANOTHER Leonora captivated Torquato, the poet, who went mad for love of her. Ah, poor fellow, how much happier had he been to lose his wits in this your day, and on your dear account, hearing you sing with Pierian voice, and wake the golden strings of your mother's lyre! Though he rolled his eyes more fiercely than Pentheus, and raved to swooning, you could have soothed his bind and reeling senses with SYLVARUM LIBER-POEMS IN VARIOUS METRES Anno ætatis 17 ON THE DEATH OF THE VICE-CHANCELLOR, A PHYSICIAN The personage here celebrated in Horatian verse was John Gostlin, M.D., twice Vicechancellor of the University of Cambridge, whose death occurred in October, 1626, at the beginning of Milton's third academic year. The verses are devoid of the personal accent, except at the close, where we may perhaps detect a strain of warmer feeling breaking through the tone of exaggerated eulogy conventionally accepted as the proper one for such academic verse-tributes. CHILDREN of Iapetus, who inhabit the pendulous orb of earth, learn to obey the laws of fate, and raise hands of humble supplication to the Parcæ. If once wandering Death coming from Tartarus calls you, alas, with woeful voice, in vain shall you resort to stratagem and delay. Every one must go through the shades of Styx. If strength of arm availed to ward off destined death, fierce Hercules would not have fallen on Macedonian Oeta, poisoned by the blood of Nessus; nor would Ilion have seen Hector slain through the base guile of envious Pallas; nor Sarpedon, whom the phantom of Achilles slew with ́ the Locrian sword, while Jove shed tears. If words of witchcraft could forestall Fate, wicked Circe, parent of Telegonus, would have lived on, and the sister of Absyrtus, Medea, would still wield her potent wand. Numenque trinum fallere si queant Faucibus eripuisse Mortis. 30 40 If arts of medicine and knowledge of mysterious plants could thwart the triple goddesses, Machaon, the son of Æsculapius, with all his skill in herbs, would not have fallen before the spear of Eurypylus; nor would the arrow of Hercules, smeared with the blood of Hydra, have undone thee, Chiron; nor wouldst thou, Esculapius, cut at thy birth from thy mother's womb, have perished by the bolts of thy grandfather's thunder. And if lore in medicine availed, you, Vice-chancellor, to whom was given direction over the gowned throng of the schools, and who were more learned than your nurseling Apollo, would not now be mourned by the leafy city of Cirrha at Parnassus' foot, nor by Helicon sitting amid its springs. You would still survive glad and honored to have charge over Pallas's flock. You would not have gone in Charon's boat to visit the awful abyss. But Persephone slit the thread of your life, angry when she saw how many lives you snatched from the black jaws of death by the art of your potent medicines. Loved master, I pray that your limbs may rest quiet beneath the gentle sod, and that from your grave roses may spring, and marigold, and the purplemouthed hyacinth. May Eacus pronounce judgment mildly on you, and Proserpina, maid of Etna, give you a smile, and may you walk forever in the Elysian fields among the blessed. GOOD King James, coming from the far north, had begun his rule over the descendants of Trojan Brut and the broad realms of Albion, and inviolable treaty had joined the sceptres of England and Scotland. Rich, happy, and at peace, he was sitting on his new throne, recking naught of open enemies or secret guile. But the fierce tyrant who rules over Acheron's fiery flood, the father of the Eumenides, the restless outcast from Heaven, was wandering through the stretches of the world, numbering his associates in evil and his faithful slaves, sharers after death in his sad realms. Here he rouses dire tempests in mid-air; there he puts hatred between loving friends. He incites invincible nations to turn the sword against each other's breast, and lays waste kingdoms that bloom with the olive of peace. Whomever he sees in love with purity and virtue, he longs to subdue to his rule; and he tries with all his masterarts of fraud to corrupt hearts into which evil has no entrance. He lays silent plots, stretches hidden snares, to seize the incautious; like the Caspian tiger, who follows his timid prey through pathless wilds under a moonless sky where the stars blink drowsily. With no worse destruction does Summanus, the Etruscan thunder-god, come upon the cities and the peoples, wreathed in a whirlwind of smoke and blue flame. And now, in his flight, Satan sees appear the fields girdled by white wave-beaten cliffs, the land loved by the sea-god, named of old from Neptune's son Albion, who feared not to cross the sea and give furious battle to fierce Hercules, before the cruel cycles of defeated Troy. He gazes on this land, happy in wealth and festal peace, and on the fields rich laden with grain, and what irks him more on a people worshiping the holy power of the true God. At the sight he breaks forth in sighs that flame with hellish fire and reek with lurid sulphur, such sighs as the fell monster Typhoeus, shut up in Trinacrian Etna by Jupiter, breathes from his pestilential mouth. His eyes blaze and the adamant row of his grinding teeth sounds like the clashing of arms and the shock of spear against spear. "This," he says, "is the one lamentable sight I have seen in my wanderings through the world. This people alone is rebellious against me, scorning my yoke and stronger than my arts. They shall not long do so with impunity, if my efforts are of any avail; this land shall not go unpunished for long, or long escape my vengeance." And as he ceases to speak, his pitchy wings swim through the liquid air. Wherever he flies, rush contrary winds in hosts, clouds gather, and lightning flashes thick. Now his swift flight had carried him beyond the rimy Alps to the borders of Italy. On his left hand were the ancient land of the Sabines and the cloud-wrapped Apennine; on his right Etruria, ill-famed for its poisoners. Thee too, Tiber, he saw, giving furtive kisses to Thetis. Soon he stood on the citadel of Mars's son Quirinus, in the dubious twilight. Through the great city the Triple-crowned Sovereign was going in procession, borne on the shoulders of men, and carrying the gods of bread. Kings bowed the knee before him; long lines of begging brothers bore in their hands wax tapers, blind souls all, born and bred in Cimmerian darkness! Soon they entered the temples which shone with their many torches (it was the Holy Eve of Peter), and the voices of the singers filled the hollow domes and empty spaces with noise like the howling of Bacchus and his crew, when they hymn their orgies on Theban Aracynthus, while Asopus trembles astonished in his |