Of Stygian darkness spets her thickest gloom, Stay thy cloudy ebon chair, Wherein thou ridest with Hecate, and befriend Us thy vow'd priests, till utmost end Of all thy dues be done, and none left out; Ere the blabbing eastern scout 2, The nice a morn, on the Indian steep Come, knit hands, and beat the ground, THE MEASURE. Break off, break off, I feel the different pace Of some chaste footing near about this ground. Run to your shrouds, within these brakes and trees; ship, and make a voyage to Lapland; while the third had an enchanted distaff, which not only when she twirled it round, against the course of nature,— Made one blot of all the air; but whatever she wished for when the cloud descended, she found at her command when it passed away and light returned. A dame so gifted could not fail to live in case and comfort; and yet, if tradition is not in error, her life was aught but easy and gladsome: her house was mean; her dress was sordid; her meals were scanty; and whenever she moved abroad, she was pursued by the hue and cry of an evil reputation. Of her tricks and her transformations,-how she could turn a fox into a brown colt, and ride it over hill and dale,-how she could become a hare, and set patent shot and the swiftest hounds at defiance, together with many matters more marvellous still,-are they not recorded in that large and unfinished volume of traditionary belief which belongs to the northern peasantry ?-C. 2 Ere the blabbing eastern scout. Shakspeare, "K. Hen. VI." P. ii. a. iv. s. 1 :— The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day. -TODD. a Nice. A finely-chosen epithet, expressing at once curious and squeamish.-HURD. b Come, knit hands, and beat the ground, In a light fantastick round. Compare Fletcher's "Faith. Shep." a. i. s. 1 : Arm in arm Tread we softly in a round: While the hollow neighbouring ground, &c.-T. WARTON. e Break off. A dance is here begun, called the measure: which the magician almost as soon breaks off, on perceiving the approach of "some chaste footing," from a sagacity appropriated to his character.-T. WARTON. A measure is said to have been a court dance of a stately turn; but sometimes to have expressed dances in general. A round is thus defined in Barret's "Alvearic," 1580. "When men daunce and sing, taking hands round." But the most curious and lively description of the measure and the round, is given in a series of fifteen lines, in Browne's Britannia's Pastorals," b. i. s. 3.—Todd. d Shrouds. To your recesses, harbours, hiding-places, &c. So in the " Hymn Nativ." v. 218. Naught but profoundest hell can be his shroud." And see "Par. Lost," b. x. 1068. Our number may affright: some virgin sure And hug him into snares. When once her eye I shall appear some harmless villager', And hearken, if I may, her business here. 150 153 160 163 We have the verb, "Par. Reg." b. iv. 419, and below in "Comus," v. 316, where the last line is written in the manuscript, "Within these shroudie limits." Whence we are led to suspect, that our author, in some of these instances, has an equivocal reference to shrouds in the sense of the branches of a tree, now often used.-T. WARTON. Adam says, that in his conversation with the angel, his earthly nature was overpowered by the heavenly, and, as with an object that excels the sense, "dazzled and spent."Par. Lost," b. viii. 457.-T. WARTON. To cheat the eye with blear illusion. But In our author's "Reformation," &c. "If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glisterings," &c. "Pr. W." i. 12. blear-eyed" is a common and well-known phrase.-T. WARTON. 66 And my quaint habits breed, &c. That is, my strange habits, as Mr. Warton has observed; in which sense, "quaint" is often used by Spenser. But Milton here illustrates himself in the Preface to his "Hist. of Moscovia:" "Long stories of absurd superstitions, ceremonies, quaint habits," &c. -TODD. Flattering, deceitful. Spenser, "Faer. Qu." WARTON. h Glozing. As in "Par. Lost," b. iii. 93. "Glozing lies." Perhaps from iii. viii. 14. "Could well his glozing speeches frame."-T. i When once her eye Hath met the virtue of this magick dust. This refers to a previous line, "my powder'd spells," v. 154. But "powder'd" was afterwards altered into the present reading " dazzling.' When a poet corrects, he is apt to forget and destroy his original train of thought.-T. WARTON. i Some harmless villager. So Satan appeared to our Saviour in the "Paradise Regained." That is, softly.-HURD. Fairly. NN 2 The LADY enters. Lad. This way the noise was, if mine ear be true, Such as the jocund flute, or gamesome pipe, As the kind hospitable woods provide P. They left me then, when the gray-hooded Even, 1 To meet the rudeness and swill'd insolence Of such late wassailers. 170 175 183 In some parts of England, especially in the west, it is still customary for a company of mummers, in the evening of the Christmas holydays, to go about carousing from house to house, who are called the wassailers. In Macbeth, "Wine and wassel," mean, in general terms, feasting and drunkenness, a. i. s. 7.-T. WARTON. Shall I inform my unacquainted feet. In the "Faithful Shepherdess," Amoret wanders through a wild wood in the night, but under different circumstances, yet not without some apprehensions of danger. We have a parallel expression in "Sams. Agon." v. 335 : hither hath inform'd Your younger feet.-T. WARTON. n Tangled wood. "They seek the dark, the bushy, the tangled forest," Prose W. vol. i. p. 13. And see "Par. Lost," b. iv. 176.-T. WARTON. This is like Virgil's sion of the same sort of the shirt of Nessus. T. WARTON. • Under the spreading favour of these pines. "Hospitiis teneat frondentibus arbos," Georg. iv. 24. An inveroccurs in Cicero, in a Latin version from Sophocles, "Trachiniæ,” "Tusc. Disp." ii. 8.—" Ipse inligatus peste interimor textili.”— P To bring me berries, or such cooling fruit So Fletcher, "Faith. Shep." a. i. s. 1, where, says the virgin-shepherdess Clorin,- By laying the scene of his Mask in a wild forest, Milton secured to himself a perpetual fund of picturesque description, which, resulting from situation, was always at hand. He was not obliged to go out of his way for this striking embellishment: it was suggested of necessity by present circumstances.-T. WARTON, 4 When the gray-hooded Even, Like a sad votarist, &c. Milton, notwithstanding his abhorrence of everything that related to superstition, often dresses his imaginary beings in the habits of popery: but poetry is of all religions; and S Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phoebus' wain. Yet naught but single darkness do I find. What might this be? A thousand fantasies 190 195 200 205 popery is a very poetical one. A votarist is one who had made a religious vow, here perhaps for a pilgrimage, being in “ palmer's weeds.”—T. WARTON. r Palmer's weed. Spenser, "Faer. Qu." ii. i. 52. "I wrapt myself in palmer's weed."—NEWTON. * Their wandering steps. So, in those beautiful and impressive lines, which close the "Paradise Lost:' They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, O thievish Night. Ph. Fletcher's "Pisc. Ecl." p. 34, edit. 1633 : the thievish night Steals on the world, and robs our eyes of light. In the present age, in which almost every common writer avoids palpable absurdities, at least monstrous and unnatural conceits, would Milton have introduced this passage, where thievish Night is supposed, for some felonious purpose, to shut up the stars in her dark lantern? Certainly not. But in the present age, correct and rational as it is, had "Comus" been written, we should not perhaps have had some of the greatest beauties of its wild and romantic imagery.-T. WARTON. "A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, &c. Milton had here perhaps a remembrance of Shakspeare, "King John," a. v. s. 7. Which, in their throng and press to that last hold, Confound themselves.-T. WARTON. Much of our own island superstition is crowded into these lines it is true that in a city guarded by a regular police and lighted by patent gas, and infested by sharpers and pickpockets, man, even though inclined to superstitious dread, cannot feel fearful of "calling shapes," and "beckoning shadows," and "airy tongues:" but let him have a haunted road-such as that along which Tam o' Shanter rode-to travel on at midnight: let his local knowledge supply him with the recollection of all the misdeeds and murders perpetrated for three miles round let there be a gloomy wood on one side of the way, and an old desolate burial-ground on the other: let him hear a sound advancing behind him, and let him see before him a doddered tree, between him and the blue sky, on which some man within his own memory hanged himself; and if he feels not something like dread upon him, he is either a very bold man or a very unimaginative one. The writer of this has heard an old gentleman, who had served with distinction in the British army, assert, oftener than once, that on riding one night past an old churchyard in a lonely part Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire", O, welcome, pure-eyed Faith; white-handed Hope, I see ye visibly, and now believe That He, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill Would send a glistering guardian, if need were, Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud I did not err; there does a sable cloud And casts a gleam over this tufted grove: 210 21 223 233 of the country, a white phantom started up from among the grave-stones, and stretched a long pale skinny hand towards the bridle of his horse. A pious ejaculation, and the application of the spur, freed him from all danger; but it was evident that he thought the sight he saw was of the other world, and not supplied by his imagination, excited into a creative fit by the solemn hour and haunted place.-C. ▾ Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, &c. I remember these superstitions, which are here finely applied, in the ancient Voyages of Marco Paolo the Venetian : he is speaking of the vast and perilous desert of Lop in Asa. "Cernuntur et audiuntur in eo, interdiu, et sæpius noctu, dæmonum variæ illusiones: unde viatoribus summe cavendum est, ne multum ab invicem seipsos dissocient, aut aliquis a tergo sese diutius impediat : alioquin, quamprimum propter montes et calles quispiam comitum suorum aspectum perdiderit, non facile ad eos perveniet: nam audiuntur ibi voces dæmonum, qui solitarie incedentes propriis appellant nominibus, voces fingentes illorum quos comitari se putant, ut a recto itinere abductos in perniciem deducant."-De Regionib. Oriental. 1. i. c. 44.-T. WARTON. w Syllable. Pronounce distinctly. As in Ph. Fletcher's "Poet. Misc." p. 85. "Yet syllabled in flesh-spell'd characters."-T. WARTON. Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings. Thus, in Shakspeare's "Lover's Complaint,' Which, like a cherubim, above them hover'd." But "hovering" is here applied with peculiar propriety to the angel Hope, in sight, on the wing; and if not appreaching, yet not flying away; still appearing. Contemplation soars on golden wings, "Il. Pens." v. 52: and we have that "golden-winged host," in the "Ode on the Death of an Infant," st. ix.-T. WARTON. y And thou, unblemish'd form of Chastity! &c. In the same strain, Fletcher's Shepherdess in the soliloquy just cited :— Then, strongest Chastity, Be thou my strongest guard; for here I'll dwell In opposition against fate and hell.-T. WARTON. Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud, &c. These lines are turned like that verse of Ovid, "Fast." lib. v. 545: "Fallor? an arma sonant? non fallimur: arma sonabant."-HURD. See also note on Eleg. v. 5. The repetition, arising from the conviction and confidence of an unaccusing conscience, is inimitably beautiful. When all succour seems to be lost, Heaven unexpectedly presents the silver lining of a sable cloud to the virtuous.-T. WARTON. |