The hollow universal orb they fill'd, And touch'd their golden harps, and hymning prais'd God and his works, Creator him they sung, Both when first evening was, and when first morn. 260 Again, God said, Let there be firmament Amid the waters, and let it divide The waters from the waters: and God made In circuit to the uttermost convex Of this great round: partition firm and sure, 261. Again, God said, &c.] When he makes God speak, he adheres closely to the words of Scripture. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters, Gen. i. 6. But when he says that God made the firmament, he explains what is meant by the firmaHebrew word, which the Greeks render by Tiga, and our translators by firmament, signifies expansion: it is rendered expansion in the margin of our Bibles, and Milton rightly explains it by the expanse of elemental air. ment. 264. —liquid air,] Virg. Æn. vi. 202. liquidumque per aëra. 267.-partition firm and sure,] For its certainty not solidity. St. Augustin upon Genesis. It is not called firmament as being a solid body, but because it is a bound or term between the upper and nether waters; a partition firm and immoveable, not upon account of its station, but of its 265 firmness and intransgressibility. 268. The waters underneath They who understand the fir- Dividing for as earth, so he the world : Built on circumfluous waters calm, in wide Of Chaos far remov'd, lest fierce extremes beams of his chambers in the waters, Psal. civ. 3. Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters above the heavens, Psal. cxlviii. 4. To this sense our poet agrees, and thus infers, that as God built the earth, and founded it on waters, (stretched out the earth above the waters, Ps. cxxxvi. 6. By the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth consisting out of the water and in the water, 2 Pet. iii. 5.) so also he established the whole frame of the heavenly orbs, in a calm crystalline sea surrounding it, lest the neighbourhood of the unruly Chaos should disturb it. But all search in works so wonderful, so distant and undiscernable, as well as undemonstrable, is quite confounded. Hume. 274. And Heav'n he named the firmament:] So Gen. i. 8. And God called the firmament Heaven. But it may seem strange if the firmament means the air and atmosphere, that the air should be called heaven: but so it is frequently in the language of the 270 275 πετεινα του Hebrews and in the style of Scripture. In this very chapter, ver. 20. it is said, fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. So in Ps. civ. 12. By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which sing among the branches. And Matt. vi. 26, what we translate the fowls of the air is in the original the fowls of heaven, ra years. So again, Rev. xix. 17, the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven. And we read often in Scripture of the rain of heaven, and the clouds of heaven. The truth is, there were three heavens in the account of the Hebrews. Mention is made of the third heaven, 2 Cor. xii. 2. The first heaven is the air, as we have shewn, wherein the clouds move and the birds fly; the second is the starry heaven, and the third heaven is the habitation of the angels and the seat of God's glory. Milton is speaking here of the first heaven, as he mentions the others in other places. Prolific humour soft'ning all her globe, 280 Fermented the great mother to conceive, Emergent, and their broad bare backs upheave 285 For haste; such flight the great command impress'd land appear.] This is again exactly copied from Moses; And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. Gen. i. 9. And it was so is very short in Moses; Milton enlarges upon it, as the subject will admit some fine strokes of poetry, and seems to have had his eye upon the 104th Psalm, which is likewise a divine hymn in praise of the creation, sixth and following verses. Thou coveredst the earth with the deep; the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled, at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away. They go up by the 290 mountains, they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them, &c. We suppose that we need not desire the reader to remark the beautiful numbers in the following verses of the poem, how they seem to rise with the rising mountains, and to sink again with the falling waters. 285. Immediately the mountains &c.] We have the same elevation of thought in the third day, when the mountains were brought forth, and the deep was made. We have also the rising of the whole vegetable world described in this day's work, which is filled with all the graces that other poets have lavished on their description of the spring, and leads the reader's imagination into a theatre equally surprising and beautiful. Addison. On the swift floods: as armies at the call Of trumpet (for of armies thou hast heard) And saw that it was good, and said, Let th' earth 299. If steep, with torrent rapture,] I have seen a marginal reading with torrent rupture, as in ver. 419. we have bursting with kindly rupture. But we may understand torrent rapture in the same manner as glad precipitance, ver. 291. 303. And on the washy ooze The earth was just now emerged where rivers now Stream, and perpetual draw their humid train. 295 300 305 You cannot read it otherwise than slowly, and so as to give your mind a picture of the thing described. Many examples of the like kind are to be found in our author and all good poets. Richardson. 307. The dry land, earth, &c.] These are again the words of Genesis formed into verse, Gen. i. 10, 11. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth. But when he comes to the descriptive part, he then opens a finer vein of poetry. Put forth the verdant grass, herb yielding seed, He scarce had said, when the bare earth, till then 310 Brought forth the tender grass, whose verdure clad 315 Then herbs of every leaf, that sudden flow'r'd Her bosom smelling sweet: and these scarce blown, Their branches hung with copious fruit, or gemm'd 325 321. The swelling gourd,] I give "swelling" instead of the old reading smelling upon the united authorities of Bentley, Pearce, and Newton himself, (although he declined altering the received text,) supported by arguments quite convincing, but too long for the occasion. E. 321. ——the corny reed] The horny reed stood upright among the undergrowth of nature, like a grove of spears or a battalion with its spikes aloft. Corneus [Latin] of or like horn. Hume. 323. --with frizzled hair implicit:] Hair, coma in Latin, is used for leaves, twigs and |