No war, or battle's sound

IV.

Was heard the world around,

The idle spear and shield were high up hung; The hooked chariot stood

Unstain'd with hostile blood;

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;

And kings sat still with awful eye,

As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was by.

But peaceful was the night,

Wherein the Prince of Light

His reign of peace upon the earth began:

The winds, with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,

Whispering new joys to the mild ocean,

Who now hath quite forgot to rave,

While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.

The stars, with deep amaze,

VI.

Stand fix'd in steadfast gaze,

Bending one way their precious influence;

And will not take their flight,

For all the morning light,

Or Lucifer, that often warn'd them thence;

But in their glimmering orbs did glow,

Until their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go.

The shepherds on the lawn,

Or e'er the point of dawn,

Sat simply chatting in a rustic row;

Full little thought they than,

That the mighty Pan

Was kindly come to live with them below;

Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep,

Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep.

Divinely-warbled voice
Answering the stringed noise,

As all their souls in blissful rapture took:

The air, such pleasures loath to lose,

With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close.

The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum

XIX.

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er

And the resounding shore,

II.

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius is with sighing sent:

With flower-inwoven tresses torn,

The Nymphs, in twilight shade of tangled thickets, mourn

In consecrated earth,

And on the holy hearth,

XXI.

The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;

In urns and altars round,

A drear and dying sound

Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint;

And the chill marble seems to sweat,

While each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat

XXVII.

But
see, the Virgin bless'd
Hath laid her Babe to rest;

Time is, our tedious song should here have ending:
Heaven's youngest-teemed star

Hath fix'd her polish'd car,

Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending.
And all about the courtly stable

Bright-harness'd angels sit in order serviceable.

LYCIDAS.1

In this Monody, the author bewails a learned friend, unfortunately drowned in nis passage from Chester on the Irish seas, 1637: and by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their highth.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,

Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

1 This poem was made upon the unfortunate and untimely death of Mr. Edward King, son of Su John King, Secretary for Ireland, a fellow collegian and intimate friend of Milton, who, as he was going to visit his relations in Ireland, was drowned, August 10, 1637, in the 25th year of his age. Dr Newton has observed, that Lycidas is with great judgment made of the pastoral kind, as both Mr.

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude;
And, with forced fingers rude,

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year:
Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear,
Compels me to disturb your season due:
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer:
Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.
He must not float upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.

5

10

Oft till the star, that rose at evening, bright,

30

Toward Heaven's descent had sloped his westering wheel.
Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute,

Temper'd to the oaten flute;

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 beautiful ideas, is pre-eminently exhibited in Lycidas; and it strikes me, that there is no poen 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 therefore so repeatedly described in all their various appearances."-T. Warton.

L. 27. "We drove afield," that is, we drove our flocks afield.

L. 28. The "sultry horn," is the sharp hum of this insect at noon.

Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven heel
From the glad sound would not be absent long;
And old Damatas loved to hear our song.

But, O, the heavy change, now thou art gone,
Now thou art gone, and never must return!

Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves,
With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown,
And all their echoes mourn:

The willows, and hazel copses green,
Shall now no more be seen,

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.

As killing as the canker to the rose,

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that grazė,

35

40

45

Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep

50

Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?

For neither were ye playing on the steep,

Where your old bards, the famous Druids, lie,

Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high,

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,
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?
Alas! what boots it with uncessant care
To tend the homely, slighted shepherd's trade,
And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?

55

Were it not better done, as others use,

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,"

75

Line 50. "Where were yer" "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 murdere.s are called "the rout." "Lycidas, 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 justý 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 móralizing 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 Mincius, the celebrated streams of bucolic song, for having so suddenly departed from pastoral allusions and the tenor of h's subject.”—T. Warton.

Phœbus replied, and touch'd my trembling ears;
"Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
Nor in the glistering foil

Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies;
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove:
As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
Of so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed."
O fountain Arethuse, and thou honor'd flood,
Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard was of a higher mood:
But now my oat proceeds,

And listens to the herald of the sea

That came in Neptune's plea :

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,
That not a blast was from his dungeon stray'd;
The air was calm, and on the level brine
Sleek Panope with all her sisters play'd;
It was that fatal and perfidious bark,

Built in the eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine.

Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,
His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge,
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.

105

Ah! who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge?
Last came, and last did go,

The pilot of the Galilean lake;

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,

110

(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,
Enow of such, as for their bellies' sake
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold?

115

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, Æolus.

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.