(383) 181. Cf. Rev. 7:17, "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. 183. genius: a tutelary spirit; the conception is pagan, but is somewhat like the Christian idea of a guardian angel. ¶ 184. recompense: i. e., for an early death at sea. ¶ 186. uncouth -unknown. ¶ 188, various quills: an allusion to the mixture of higher and sterner notes with the pastoral and elegiac strain; see ll. 87, 132. quills #reeds, pipes. ¶ 189. Doric lay: pastoral songs; called Doric because Greek pastorals were written in the Doric dialect. 193. fresh woods and pastures new: apparently an allusion to his purpose to write poetry of a different and greater kind; cf. note on ll. 3-5.

(383) WHEN The Assault Was Intended to THE CITY. In the Cambridge MS, the heading, in the hand of the amanuensis who copied the sonnet itself, was "On his Dore when ye Citty expected an assault"; this was crossed out, and the present heading inserted in Milton's hand. In November, 1642, the king's army was very near London, and the city was in great alarm, expecting an immediate attack; streets were closed by chains, and house-doors were barred. 1. colonel: a trisyllable here. 6. gentle: noble, magnanimous, characteristic of a gentleman or person of good birth. 10. Emathian conqueror: Alexander the Great; Emathia was a province of Macedonia, Alexander's kingdom. ¶ 11. Pindarus: Pliny says that when Alexander sacked Thebes, in 335 B. C., he spared the house of the poet Pindar, who had been dead more than a century. 12. repeated recited. ¶ 13. Electra's poet: Euripides, one of whose plays is about Electra, the sister of the matricide Orestes and the daughter of the murderess, Clytemnestra. ¶ 14. Plutarch says that when the Spartans were about to raze Athens, which they had just taken, in 404 B. C., the recitation of lines from Euripides' play induced the victors to destroy only the fortifications of the city.

(383) TO THE LADY MARGARET LEY. Milton's nephew and biographer, Edward Phillips, says that after the poet's wife left him, in 1643, he "made it his chief diversion now and then of an evening to visit the Lady Margaret Ley." She was the daughter of James Ley, first earl of Marlborough. 3. fee: bribe. 14. more in himself content: i. e., more than in outward honors.

(384) 5. breaking of that Parliament: the dissolution of Parliament by Charles 1, in 1629, which was an ominous sign of the king's purpose to rule independently of Parliament; the earl's death, four days after, at the age of 77. was attributed to his anxiety over the political situation. ¶6. dishonest dishonorable, robbing of honor; cf. "fatal to liberty" (1. 7). 17. Charonea: here Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander, defeated the Athenians and Thebans, in 338 B. C., and crushed the liberties of Greece. 8. that old man eloquent: Isocrates, the famous Greek orator, who died at the age of 99, four days after hearing of the defeat.

(384) ON THE DETRACTION WHICH FOLLOWED UPON MY WRITING CERTAIN TREATISES. This title, which is Milton's own, is prefixed to two sonnets; the one here printed is the second, now usually headed "On the Same." The "certain treatises" were Milton's divorce pamphlets, published in 1643-45, advocating greater liberty of divorce. ¶ 2. Cf. a part of the titlepage of Tetrachordon, one of the "treatises": "Wherein the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, as was lately published, is confirmed by Explanation of Scripture, by Testimony of ancient Fathers, of Civil Laws in the Primitive Church." ¶5-7. When Latona, with her children, Apollo and Diana, was fleeing from the wrath of jealous Juno, certain rustics railed at her and mudded the water of a pool where she had stooped to drink; they were changed into frogs, to live in the muddy water of the pool. 7. in fee: in absolute right (cf. "fee simple"), as the deities of them. ¶8. Cf. Matt. 7:6. 10. Cf. John 8:32: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." ¶ 12. Cf. Comus, l. 1019, p. 378. ¶ 13. rove: a term from archery, meaning "to shoot wide of the mark." 14. The allusion is to the cost and bloodshed of the Civil War, which the Puritans and Presbyterians had waged ostensibly for freedom. For all-notwithstanding.

(384) TO THE Lord General CROMWELL.

(385) 5, 6. A compact union of two figures: (1) the subjection of an enemy to the yoke, with perhaps the additional idea of the neck and head being prostrate in the dust; (2) the raising of a memorial of the victory. As to the first figure, cf. King Richard II, III. i. 19,

"Have stooped my neck under your injuries," and Cymbeline, III. iii. 91, 92, "Thus mine enemy fell, And thus I set my foot on 's neck." Milton's allusion is to the overthrow of Charles I and the monarchical party ("crownèd Fortune") by Cromwell as the leader of the religious reformers (hence "God's trophies"). ¶ 7. Darwen stream: a small river in the northwest of England, near Preston, where Cromwell routed the invading Scotch army in a three days' battle, August 17-19, 1648. ¶8. Dunbar field: there, in the south of Scotland, Cromwell defeated the Scottish army, September 3, 1650. resounds: "The verb in the singular, to distribute it between the three nominatives, one of which is still to come."-Masson. 19. Worcester's laureate wreath: the battle of Worcester, September 3, 1651, in which Cromwell scattered the army that Charles II had led down from Scotland, placed the wreath of final victory upon his head; Charles fled to the continent, not to return until the Restoration, in 1660. 11-14. The "new foes" were the Presbyterian clergy, who seemed disposed to take for themselves alone all the property of the prostrate English church, and also to re-establish some form of state church (see l. 12).

(385) ON THE Late MassacrE IN PIEMONT. The circumstances that gave rise to the sonnet are set forth in the following sentences from the letter which Milton, as Latin secretary to the Commonwealth, wrote in May, 1654, at Cromwell's order: "Oliver the Protector, &c., to the most Serene Prince, Immanuel, Duke of Savoy, Prince of Piemont, greeting. Most Serene Prince, letters have been sent us from Geneva, wherein we are given to understand that such of your royal highness' subjects as profess the reformed religion are commanded by your edict and by your authority, within three days after the promulgation of your edict, to depart their native seats and habitations, upon pain of capital punishment and forfeiture of all their fortunes and estates, unless they will give security to relinquish their religion within twenty days and embrace the Roman Catholic faith; and that when they applied themselves to your royal highness in a most suppliant manner, imploring a revocation of the said edict, . . . . a part of your army fell upon them, most cruelly slew several, put others in chains, and compelled the rest to fly into desert places and to the mountains covered with snow, where some hundreds of families are reduced to such distress that it is greatly to be feared they will in a short time all miserably perish through cold and hunger."-Letters of State, Bohn translation. The people so persecuted were the Waldenses, or Vaudois, a simple folk, half French, half Italian, living in the valleys of the Cottian Alps, between France and Piedmont, a district of northwestern Italy. 3. It was supposed that the Waldenses had preserved the primitive form of Christianity from the time of the apostles; the fact is that the sect (named from its founder, Waldo) originated inside the Roman Catholic church, in the twelfth century, and retained many characteristics of the Catholic faith (such as the worship of the Virgin Mary and the saints) until the time of the Reformation under Luther. 4. England was Roman Catholic until the early part of the sixteenth century. worshipt stocks and stones: the use of images in the Roman Catholic church was considered idolatry by the Protestants of Milton's day. 8. Mother with infant: in Moreland's History of the Valleys of Piedmont (1658), describing the massacre, is a statement that "a mother was hurled down a mighty rock, with a little infant in her arms, and three days after was found dead, with the little child alive." The sonnet was probably written before the book was published; but Moreland was Cromwell's agent in Piedmont, and Milton may have learned this detail from him by letter. ¶ 12. triple Tyrant: the Pope; "triple" refers to his tiara, or triple crown. ¶ 12, 13. may grow A hundredfold: the thought is the same as in the saying, attributed to Tertullian, "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church"; cf. "Avenge" (l. 1). ¶ 13. Thy way: i. e., the Protestant form of Christianity. 14. Babylonian: the Puritans considered the Papacy the scarlet woman of Babylon, the "mother of abominations" and enemy of Christ; see Rev., chaps. 17, 18. punishment of the Papacy at the Last Judgment.

woe: the

(385) ON HIS BLINDNESS. 2. Ere half my days: Milton's blindness was total in 1652, when he was forty-four years old. 3. one talent: not one special gift or faculty, but small ability in contrast to great ability; cf. the parable of the talents, Matt. 25:14 ff. 17. light denied: i. e., when light is denied. 8. fondly foolishly.

(386) To Mr. CYRIACK SKINNER UPON HIS BLINDNESS. Cyriack Skinner, a grandson of the famous judge, Sir Edward Coke, and probably a former pupil of Milton, was one of his most intimate friends after he became blind. The exact cause of Milton's blindness is unknown, but it seems to have been failure of the optic nerve; he inherited from his mother a certain weakness of the eyes, which was increased by his habit of late study. In a letter written September 28, 1654, to Leonard Philaras, an Athenian ambassador at the court of France, the poet gives interesting details of his case, which are in part as follows: "The sight in my other eye has now been gradually and sensibly vanishing away for about three years; some months before it had entirely perished, though I stood motionless everything which I looked at seemed in motion to and fro. . . . I ought not to omit that while I had any sight left, as soon as I lay down on my bed and turned on either side, a flood of light used to gush from my closed eyelids. Then, as my sight became daily more impaired, the colors became more faint, and were emitted with a certain inward crackling sound; but at present, every species of illumination being, as it were, extinguished, there is diffused around me nothing but darkness, or darkness mingled and streaked with an ashy brown. Yet the darkness in which I am perpetually immersed seems always, both by day and night, to approach nearer to white than black; and when the eye is rolling in its socket, it admits a little particle of light, as though a chink. . . . . I wish you adieu with no less courage and composure than if I had the eyes of a lynx."-Familiar Letters, XV, Bohn translation. ¶ 1. this three years' day: i. e., three years this day. ¶ 10. conscience = consciousness; a frequent use of the word then. 11. In liberty's defence. In 1650 the great continental scholar, Salmasius, published Defensio Regia, attacking the English Commonwealth for the execution of Charles I. Milton made a crushing rejoinder, in 1651, in his Defensio pro Populo Anglicano ("Defense of the English People'), although he knew that the work would cost him his eyesight: "When I was publicly solicited to write a reply to the defence of the royal cause, when I had to contend with the pressure of sickness and with the apprehension of soon losing the sight of my remaining eye, and when my medical attendants clearly announced that if I did engage in the work it would be irreparably lost, their premonitions caused no hesitation and inspired no dismay. . . . . I resolved, therefore, to make the short interval of sight which was left to me to enjoy as beneficial as possible to the public interest."-The Second Defence of the People of England (1654), Bohn translation. 12. The Council of State passed a vote of thanks to Milton, June 17, 1651, for "his book in vindication of the Parliament and people of England." "From all the embassies in London Milton received formal calls or speedy messages of compliment expressly on account of the book; and in Holland, France, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, and elsewhere, copies were in extraordinary demand, and a topic of talk among scholars for months was the mangling which the great Salmasius had received from one of 'the English mastiffs.' It is not too much to say that before the end of the year 1651, in consequence of this one book, Milton's name was more widely known on the continent than that of any other Englishman then living except Oliver Cromwell."-Masson. talks: the reading of the Cambridge MS; "rings" occurs in the first edition of the sonnet, in 1694, when it was published, with others, by Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew. It might be supposed that Phillips had Milton's authority for the change were it not that his edition contains several other variations from the MS, all for the worse (as "this" for "the" in l. 13, and "other" for "better" in l. 14). It looks as if Phillips had tried his hand at emending the manuscript of his famous uncle, and made one lucky alteration--which was, however, probably suggested by the first line of the sonnet to Fairfax, "Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings." ¶ 13. vain empty, unsatisfying. mask: the allusion is to the spectacular dramatic performances called masks, especially to the great court masks, in which there was much show and glitter of a very unsubstantial sort, ¶ 14. had I: i. e., even if I had. better guide: cf. Milton's letter to Philaras, quoted above: "While He so tenderly provides for me, while He so graciously leads me by the hand and conducts me on the way, I will, since it is His pleasure, rather rejoice than repine at being blind."

....

(387) ON HIS DECEASED WIFE, Milton's second wife, Catherine Woodcock, died in childbirth in 1658, fifteen months after the marriage. ¶2. like Alcestis: Alcestis, who had

voluntarily died in place of her husband, Admetus, king of Thessaly, was brought back from Hades by Heracles. 5, 6. Cf. Lev., chap. 12. ¶ 10. Her face was veiled: it is probable that Milton had never seen his wife; but there may be merely an allusion to the veil on the face of Alcestis when she was restored to her husband.

(387) PARADISE LOST. Milton was planning his great epic and preparing himself to write it, years before he actually composed it. "When Thou hast settled peace in the Church, and righteous judgment in the kingdom, then shall all Thy saints address their voices of joy and triumph to Thee, standing on the shore of that Red Sea into which our enemies had almost driven us. And he that now for haste snatches up a plain ungarnished present as a thank-offering to Thee, . . . . may then perhaps take up a harp and sing Thee an elaborate song to generations."-Milton, Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus (1641), Section 4. "Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader, that for some years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapors of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amorist, or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit, Who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge and sends out His Seraphim, with the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases: to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs."-Milton, The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty (1641), Book II, Introduction. "The measure is English heroic verse, without rime, as that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre, graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause, therefore, some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rime both in longer and shorter works, as have also, long since, our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect, then, of rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming."-Prefatory Statement, added by Milton in 1668.

(387) Book I. ¶6. secret-remote, solitary; with reference to Sinai, however, there may be allusion to the clouds which veiled the mountain-top when the Law was given to Moses (see Ex. 19:16-20). ¶ 7. Oreb: Mt. Horeb, where God appeared to Moses in the burning bush see Ex., chap. 3. ¶8. shepherd: "Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law."— Ex. 3:1. 9. In the beginning: the words are to be taken with "Rose," not with "taught." 10. Sion hill: Mt. Zion, on which was Jerusalem; as Moses is associated with Horeb and Sinai, so Jerusalem suggests David, the greatest of the Hebrew lyric poets. 12. Fast= close. oracle of God: the temple of Solomon; it stood on Mt. Moriah, at the foot of which was Siloa. Milton seems to be making the parallel with Greek fable as close as possible; cf. "Lycidas," ll. 15, 16, p. 379.

(388) 15. Above: i. e., higher than. Aonian mount: Mt. Helicon, in Aonia, the fabled abode of the Muses. ¶ 16. Cf. Comus, II. 43-45, p. 353. The statement is not true in the sense that the subjects of the fall of the angels, the creation of the world, and the fall of man had never been treated before, for-to mention only some of the more important works-they had been handled, in whole or in part, in Old English poems paraphrasing Genesis, in Middle English miracle plays, in Sylvester's Divine Weeks and Works (1598), in Grotius' Adamus Exul (1601), in Andreini's Adamo (1613), and in Vondel's Lucifer (1654). Some of these works

Milton surely knew, and he probably got hints from them. He must have meant, therefore, only that in purpose, scope, and epic largeness his poem was new. 20, 21. Cf. Gen. 1:2: "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." 24. argument theme. ¶3849. Cf. Isa. 14:12-15. 41. he: Satan, not God. 45. Cf. Luke 10:18, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." ethereal sky: the upper ether, heaven, in distinction from the lower sky over the earth. 46. ruin =fall; the original Latin sense (Latin "ruina," from "ruere," to fall with violence). combustion: cf. “flaming" (l. 47.) ¶ 47, 48. Cf. Rev. 20:1, 2, (389) 56. baleful-full of misery (from O. E. "bealu," which means both evil and calamity); cf. next line. ¶57. witnessed = testified to, exhibited. ¶66. hope never comes: cf. Euripides, Troades, 676, 677:

οὐδ' ὃ πᾶσι λείπεται βροτοῖς ξύνεστιν ἐλπίς.

"Not even hope, which remains to all mortals, is here." Cf. also Dante, Divina Commedia, "Inferno," III. 9, "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate," "Abandon all hope, ye who enter"--the inscription over the entrance to hell. ¶ 72. utter outer (O. E. "ut," out); cf. Book III. 16, p. 407. 74. Centre: the center of the carth, which, in the Ptolemaic astronomy, was also the center of the starry universe with its ten spheres; see note on "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," 1. 48, p. 479. utmost pole: the extremity of the axis of this spherical universe. In Paradise Lost the universe is thought of as hanging by a short golden chain from heaven, God's dwelling-place (Book II. 1047 ff.), and hence the distance from the center to the pole is the distance from earth to heaven. Hell, then, is three times this distance from heaven; but "thrice" may be used only in a general sense, as often in classic poetry. In plac ing hell at this enormous distance down in the depths of chaos, Milton is following Homer and more exactly Virgil. Cf. the Iliad, viii. 13-16: “I will take and cast him into misty Tartaros, .... as far beneath Hades as heaven is high above the earth."-Lang, Leaf, and Myers translation. Cf. also the Eneid, vi. 577-79:

Tum Tartarus ipse

Bis patet in praeceps tantum tenditque sub umbras,
Quantus ad aetherium caeli suspectus Olympum.

"Then Tartarus lies down twice as great a steep, and extends beneath the shades as far as is the heavenward view up to ethereal Olympus." ¶75. Cf. the Old English poem, now called "Genesis B" (first published in 1655 by Milton's friend, Franciscus Junius):

Is hes ænga styde ungelic swide

þam ocrum þe we ær cudon,
heah on heofonrice.

"This narrow place is most unlike the other which erst we knew, high in heaven's kingdom." ¶ 78. well'ring=tossing about, rolling. ¶82. thence therefore; "Satan," in Hebrew, means "adversary." ¶83. With regard to Satan's character and speeches compare the following:

Never

"There is no outrage nor artifice by which Jupiter shall bring me to utter this before my torturing shackles shall have been loosened. Wherefore let his glowing lightning he hurled; and with the white-feathered shower of snow, and thunderings beneath the earth, let him confound and embroil the universe; for naught of these things shall bend me so much as even to say by whom it is doomed that he shall be put down from his sovereignty. . . . let it enter your thoughts that I, affrighted by the purpose of Jupiter, shall become womanish, and shall importune the object whom I greatly loathe, with effeminate upliftings of my hands, to release me from these shackles: I want much of that."-Eschylus, Prometheus Bound, 11. 986 ff., Bohn translation.

Lucifer. I reck not what He means to make His heaven,
Nor care I what His creature, man, may be.

Too obstinate and firm

Is my undaunted thought,