Yet unconsumed. On either side a formidable shape. Before the gates there sat The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair; 650 Voluminous and vasta serpent armed A cry of hell-hounds never-ceasing barked 655 660 ton's prose. -648. Unconsumed. Prof. Himes finds in the phenomena of the aurora borealis a physical basis for this picture; especially as the gates were probably at the outer boundary of the 'frozen continent.'-648. Before, etc. The famous allegory which follows is founded on James i. 15, "Then when Lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth Sin, and Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth Death."-650. Woman, etc. The commentators cite, as partial sources of Milton's description of Sin, Faerie Queene, I. I. 14; II. VII. 40; Fletcher's Purple Island, XII. 27; Hesiod's Theogony, 298; Horace's De Arte Poet. 4; Ovid's Met. XIV. 59–67. Note the alliteration in several of these lines. -653. Sting. "The sting of death is sin.' 1 Cor. xv. 56.654. Cry, pack. "You common cry of curs." Shakes. Coriolanus, III. 3. The hell-hounds are the horrors of a guilty conscience?-655-56. Cerberean, like those of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of hell. See Class. Dict. Rung, etc. 'Hath rung night's yawning peal.' Macbeth, III. II. 43. — 659. Less abhorred hounds than these.-660. Scylla. The story is that Scylla was once a beautiful maiden, but that the enchantress Circe changed her body below her waist into barking monsters by infecting with baleful juices the water in which Scylla was wont to bathe. Says Homer, "She has twelve feet, and six long necks, with a terrific head and three rows of close-set teeth on each. Out of every ship that passes, each mouth takes a man.” Odys. XII. 89, etc. See Class. Dict. 661. Trinacrian (Gr. Tpeîs, treis, three; aкpaι, akrai, promontories; Trinacria, land of the three promontories,' on the N. E., S. E., and W.), Sicilian. Calabria Southern Italy, including in the middle ages the land of the Bruttii. -662. Nor uglier hell-hounds follow. Night-hag. 'From the Scandinavian mythology, in which night-hags, riding through the air, and requiring infant blood for their incantations, are common, and Lapland is their favorite region.' Masson. 663. Riding, etc. "Infected be the air whereon they [witches] ride." Macbeth, IV. 1. 138. "Grimm tells us that he - Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell, 665 670 And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on. Satan was now at hand, and from his seat The monster moving onward came as fast 675 With horrid strides; hell trembled as he strode. does not know when broom-sticks, spits, and similar utensils were first assumed to be the canonical instruments of this nocturnal equitation. He thinks it comparatively modern; but I suspect it is as old as the first child that ever bestrode his father's staff, and fancied it into a courser shod with wind, like those of Pindar. Alas for the poverty of human invention! It cannot afford a hippogriff for an every-day occasion. The poor old crones, badgered by inquisitors into confessing they had been where they never were, were involved in the further necessity of explaining how the- they got there. The only steed their parents had ever been rich enough to keep had been of this domestic sort. . . . If youth and good spirits could put such life into a dead stick once, why not age and evil spirits now?" Lowell's essay on Witchcraft in Among my Books. Falstaff mounts their master on a different nag, a fiddlestick. 1 Henry IV., II. IV. — 665. Laboring. Virgil calls lunar eclipses lunæ labores, labors of the moon. Juvenal has the precise equivalent. Sat. VI. 443.666. Charms. Meaning? - The other shape, etc. "The grandest efforts of poetry," remarks Coleridge on this passage, "are where the imagination is called forth to produce, not a distinct form, but a strong working of the mind, still offering what is still repelled, and again creating what is again rejected; the result being what the poet wishes to impress; viz. the substitution of a sublime feeling of unimaginable for mere images." Test this celebrated description of Death by Coleridge's principle. See Job iv. 13 to 17.673. Kingly crown. Because Death is the king of terrors'? Job xviii. 14; Rev. vi. 2, 8. — 676. Trembled as he strode. Hence Prof. Himes infers, contrary to Masson's opinion, that the gates were not at the highest point of the concave roof overhead, but 'in a perpendicular wall' at the 'boundary of hell's outmost circle of extreme cold.' See Introduction. — 677. Created thing nought valued he, nor shunned; "Whence, and what art thou, execrable shape. To yonder gates? Through them I mean to pass, "Art thou that traitor-angel, art thou he, 680 685 Who first broke peace in heaven, and faith, till then 690 Drew after him the third part of heaven's sons And reckonest thou thyself with spirits of heaven, 695 Admired, wondered. I. 690.678. Except. This sentence beginning with 'God' and ending with 'shunned,' is usually conceded to be in strictness ungrammatical, or at least un-English; as if God and his Son were included by Milton among created things. The commentators seek to justify Milton by quoting similar examples from Dante and other great poets, Sir Thomas Browne and other eminent prose writers. But suppose we interpret thus: "The undaunted Fiend wondered what this might be; wondered, not feared [anything whatever], except [it were] God and his Son." Prof. Himes remarks: "To the Son are ascribed [by Milton] omnipotence, omniscience, and, through the continual presence of the Father, infinity in every respect. He is never represented as accomplishing any of his great works without the Father; but whatever he does, and wherever he goes, the Father is always with him (VII. 588-90). He had existed with God as his Word (sensible to hearing as now to sight?) from eternity. He is not God alone without the Father; neither is the Father God alone without the Son, inasmuch as he calls the Son 'my word, my wisdom, my effectual might.'" III. 170.-688. Goblin (Fr. gobelin, an ugly spirit; Welsh, coblyn; Ger. kobold, an underground spirit that creeps in mines; Gr. 6ẞaλos, kobalos; Armoric, gobilin, 'lubbar-fiend'), a frightful phantom.-692. Rev. xii. 4, 7, 9.-693. Conjured (Lat. con, together, jurare, to swear), sworn together, in sworn conspiracy. Conjured. - 696. Spirits of heaven, the retort to 1. 687; as hell-doomed is to bell-born. Where I reign king, and, to enrage thee more, 700 Thy lingering, or with one stroke of this dart Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before!" So speaking and so threatening, grew tenfold 705 More dreadful and deform. On the other side, 710 700. False. Why false?-701. King Rehoboam threatened, "My father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions." 1 Kings xii. 11. Whip of scorpions is a name, like 'cat-o-nine-tails.' — 706. Deform (Lat. de, from, away from; forma, beauty).-707. Incensed (Lat. incendere, to set on fire; candère, to be glowing hot), aflame, on fire. — 709. Ophiuchus (Gr. õpis, ophis, serpent; exew, echein, to hold; ¿piouxos), the serpent-holder, a northern constellation forty degrees long, formerly pictured as a man with his foot on the scorpion, his head near that of Hercules, and holding a serpent in his hand. See map of these constellations. Is there any significance in this collocation (which does not seem to have attracted the attention of the commentators)? Satan, Sin, Death, in the poem; the comet, Hercules, the Scorpion, the Serpent, and the gigantic Serpent-holder, in the sky!-710, 711. Hair. Comet is from Gr. koμńτns, hairy, fr. kóun, flowing hair. Shakes pestilence, etc. The old belief that comets portend disasters, is uttered in the first three lines of 1 Henry VI. (see Proctor's essay on Comets as Portents in his Myths and Marvels of Astronomy): "Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night. Comets, importing change of time and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky." 714. As when, etc. "Not quite correct, for bodies in the air cannot move in opposite directions, as the wind blows only one way at a time." Keightley. The meteorologists do not agree with Mr. Keightley. "When opposite winds PARADISE LOST. With heaven's artillery fraught, come rattling on So frowned the mighty combatants that hell 715 Grew darker at their frown; so matched they stood; 720 To meet so great a foe. And now great deeds Had been achieved, whereof all hell had rung, 66 Against thy father's head? and knowest for whom ! "So strange thy outcry, and thy words so strange 725 730 735 of different temperature meet," says Guyot, explaining the cause of tornadoes, a vast amount of vapor is condensed into a thick black cloud, and a whirling motion is given to the air," etc.—715. Fraught, etc. (Ger. fracht; Fr. fret, freight, the loading of a wagon or a ship; Ger. ferchen, to despatch; Swiss ferken, to forward goods. Wedgwood.) Rattling. So artillery wagons always rattle. Heaven's artillery is a phrase in Shakes. —716. The Caspian was noted for storms. Nor do hurricanes forever harass the Caspian," Hor. Odes, II. 9. 66 Clouds, together crushed and bruised, pour down a tempest by the Caspian shore." Fairfax's Tasso. 241 (A.D. 1625). So Purchas' Pilgrims, III. 720. Grew darker, etc. "Where he looked, a gloom pervaded space." Byron. -721. Once more, etc. Christ is to destroy death (1 Cor. xv. 26), and the devil (Heb. ii. 14). Snaky. Why this epithet? — 730. Knowest (the si for σú, su, thou, tu, thou, sufficiently indicates the subject thou), though thou knowest for whom thou doest it. -731. Laughs, etc. "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh." Ps. ii. 4.-735. So Ariosto calls the Fury See Isaiah xxv. 8. — 724. termination st, a relic of |
