CORNELL ,,yNIVER*SlfY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library PR 3558.T98 3 1924 013 190 339 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013190339 "LYCIDAS" Facsimile (reduced) from the Original MS. of Lycidas of the " Rathe Primrose " stanza. iJy Izind permission ff Mr Aldis Wright- "LYCID AS" A MONOGRAPH BY REV. W. TUCKWELL LATE FELLOW OF NEW COLLBGE, OXFOBD AUTHOR OF " TONGUES IN TBEE3,*' " LIFE OF A. W. KINGLAKB," ** BEMINISCENCEB OF OXFORD," " PRE-TRAOTARIAN OXFORD,* " BEMIKI80EHCES OF a RADICAL PARSON," ETC., ETC, LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1911 V. C/VV\ Una speravi tecum, dilecte Favoni, Credulus heu longos, ut quondam, fallere Soles : Heu Spes nequicqaam dulces, atque irrita TOta ! Heu masstos Soles, sine te quos ducere fleudo Per desideria et questus jam cogor inanes ! CONTENTS OHAP. PAOB I. Introduction. .... 9 II. The Original Draft ... 13 III.?Analysis and Illustration . . 23 " LYCIDAS " I.— INTRODUCTION "In Lycidas," says Mark Pattison in his Life of Milton, "we have reached the high-water mark of English poesy and of Milton's own production. A period of a century and a half was to elapse before poetry in England seemed, in Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality, to be rising again towards the level of inspiration which it had once attained in Lycidas." This verdict, so far as Lycidas is concerned, repre- sents an estimate all but universal. "Lycidas" says\ Tennyson, "is a test of any man's poetic instinct. "- The one notable dissentient from this view is John- J son, whose peevish, if lively, vilipending of the poem has injured not Milton but himself. A slave to the conventional style in poetry which Pope had made for the time triumphant, and in which he was him- self a proficient, he saw in the ballads of Percfs Reliques subjects only for mocking travesty, pro- nouncing Pastoral poetry especially to be "vulgar, easy, and disgusting." His censure of Lycidas was met at the time by his friend Warton with a dignified and convincing protest : his admirers ever since have felt that it is best forgotten. As a sacred personal tribute, Lycidas stands per- haps highest among the inspired elegies with which great poets have vented their grief for dearest pledges reft, for brother poets loved and early lost : it takes rank with Spenser's Astrophel, Shelley's Adonais, lo "LYCIDAS" Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis. As a reflection of Milton's mental history it marks a parting of the ways : in the tender grace of the lament for the departed friend we have the sweet mournfulness of Spenserian melody : the suppressed passion of the outbreak against hire- ling clergy forecasts the prophetic period of political and religious rage, which was for twenty years to turn him away from verse, to transform the Cavalier poet into the Puritan zealot. In the year 1637, Edward King, son of Sir J. King, Secretary to the 'English Government in Ireland, was shipwrecked and drowned in crossing from Chester to Dublin. He was a Junior Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, one of a brilliant set of Seventeenth Century " Apostles," which included Milton himself, Henry More the Platonist, and the Satirist Cleveland, little known to-day, but highly popular and widely read amongst his contemporaries. His friends agreed to embalm his memory ' in a volume of short elegies; and in 1638 were published ■^ Obsequies to the Memory of Edward King, thirteen in all, none deserving immortality except Milton's Lycidas, which came last. The autograph manuscript is preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge : it has been beautifully reproduced through the camera by Mr Aldis Wright, and is here transcribed (pp. 14-22) in type, with its spellings, erasures, interpolations, and additions. Lycidas was cast by its author in the Pastoral mould; a poetical artifice not yet extinct, and bear- ing in its past the stamp of many mints. It began" rudely amongst the early Dorian settlers in Sicily, whose songs to their goddess Artemis took the shape of dialogues between shepherds or groups of shep- herds. These were first formed into a branch of regular classic literature about b.c. 270 by Theocritus, a native of Syracuse, but resident occasionally at the INTRODUCTION ii Court of the Ptolemies in Alexandria. This writer's felicity of language and descriptive force, flavoured curiously by his mellifluous Doric brogue, gave him a high place amongst Grecian poets, and caused him to be entitled the founder of Pastoral or Bucolic poetry. He realised, as did Wordsworth long after- wards, the sweetness of common life, and so gave us the Idyll in its varied forms. Some of his Carmina deal with subjects classical or mythological; one, the Adoniatusm, reproduces with delightful humour the chatter of two Alexandrian ladies attending the Festival of Adonis. But the Idylls, with which his name is most closely associated, paint realistically the daily life of the Sicilian people. Shepherds converse in natural fashion about their flocks, their masters, their amours ; quarrel and make up ; contend in singing for a prize ; lament the death of Daphnis, the typical Sicilian shepherd. Lovesick swains apos- trophise the obdurate fair one; a town-bred girl disdains a rustic lover; a country girl yields to the rough but persuasive wooing of a likely neighbour lad ; fishermen, waking in the night upon the beach, recount to one another their dreams ; the every day experiences of country folk, simple scenes and inci- dents, fresh with the breath of Nature, are told with dramatic simplicity, exquisite beauty of language, and frequent touches of comedy. Of his contemporary Bion, also reckoned among the Greek Pastoral poets, the surviving works are few and fragmentary; we know him chiefly from a poem in his praise by his friend and pupil Moschus : For when Sicilian shepherds lost a mate, Some good survivor with his -flute would go, Piping a ditty sad for Bion's sake ; both poets are markedly inferior to Theocritus. In later Greek pastorals the poetic feeling is retained, but the treatment is no longer natural: nymphs 12 "LYCIDAS" and shepherds become allegorical vehicles for grace- ful sentiment, such as. the educated lover of the country rather than its rustic occupant evokes from its sights and sounds. Virgil's earliest poems, which he called " Bucolics," adopt this second and artificial style : professed and often close imitations of Theo- critus, they lack the . veracious country cast of the Greek idylls, fail to justify their titles as representa- tive of rural life among Italian peasants. As idyllic poetry they are a conventional sham ; but their per- fect execution secured to them contemporary success, and enables them to be read with pleasure still. To the earlier poets of the Renaissance, their \ allegorising was as attractive as their melody : the Bucolics of Virgil were copied by Petrarch, Marot, Ronsard, and became text-books for the Grammar Schools, along with the not less popular eclogues of Baptiste Spagnuole, who under the better known name of Baptista Mantuanus is affectionately quoted by the pedant Holofernes in " Lov^s Labour Lost." In 1563 a volume of English eclogues was put out by Barnabee Googe ; and six years later Spenser imped his wing on the Shepheards Cahndar, Milton, who repeatedly bo rrows f roni_thg_eld.er, poet, here, as forinerly va^Sa Arcades and Comus, adopts the masquerade under which Spenser's first notable pro- duction was presented. The name " Lycidas_"_is familiar to the classic ^goets : m Thei)£ritusjp.\. 14) he is " every inct a^ixerdsman, excelling all his peers " ; and later in the same idyll (v. 2 7), " all say that no herdsman or haymaker is thy match at piping." In Virgil {Ed. vii. 67) he is a beautiful shepherd; in Eel. ix. he holds a dialogue; Horace {Od. I. xix. 19) cites him as a delicate lad with whom everyone is in love. II.— THE ORIGINAL DRAFT The original autograph MS. of Lyddas was pre- sented to the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, by Sir Henry Newton Puckering. How it came into his possession is unknown. Buried amongst a host of other papers, it remained unnoticed until it was discovered by Professor Mason, Fellow of the College ; and in 1 736 it was placed in a handsome binding by Thomas Clarke, Fellow, and afterwards Master of the Rolls. Reproduced in photograph by Mr A. G. Dew Smith, it was edited, with a transcript into Roman type, in 1899, under the superintendence of Mr W. Aldis Wright. The manuscript contains, 1 besides Lyddas, the Arcades, Comus, Blest Pair of Sirens, the lines upon "The Circumcision" and on " Time," the first sketch of Paradise Lost, with cer- tain scattered notes, and sixteen sonnets. Five of these last, together with certain notes, are written by an amanuensis : the rest, including Lyddas, are in Milton'sown hand. The Lyddas is written on five sheets of pale brown paper, 12 in. x ^\ in. in size. Leaf i exhibits fragments of the poem, apparently tentative. In leaves 2 and 3 the text is full and continuous. Leaf 4 is only half filled, containing marginal references to one of the fragments on leaf i. Leaf 5 completes the poem half-way down, leaving the rest of the sheet blank. The whole is written in a neat hand, blurred occasionally as by a thick pen or faulty ink. I have imitated the erasures and corrections as Milton made them, preserving also his punctuation. The omission of stops in the text is even more unaccountable than their presence. 18 14 "LYCIDAS" [These are fragments on a separate leaf, apparently prefatory attempts.] Yet once more O ye lawrells and once more ye myrtles browne w"" I vie never scare I come to pluck y' berries harsh and crude before the mellowing yeare and w* forc't fingers rude and crop y*^ young shatter y"^ leaves before y'^ mellowing yeare bitter constraint, and sad occasion deare compells me to disturb y^ season due fory««ng Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime young Lycidas and hath not left his peere /who would not sing for Lycidas he well knew himselfe to sing & build the loftie rime he must not flote upon his watrie beare unwept, and welter to the parching wind without the meade of some melodious teare [Here is a gap.J ^Bqng the rathe primrose that unwedded dies eeHw'BQlouring the pale cheeke of uninj^'d^ove and that sad fiowre that strove to write his cwne woes on the..v€fmeil graine next adde Narcissiisvy' sJbiHweeps in vaine the woodbine and y^^Jaftsie freakt w* jet the glowing vio the cowslio^^mi that hangs his p"&R§iye head and evpryhud that sorrows liverie weSi^ with V, 'Daffadillies fill thire cups a teares THE ORIGINAL DRAFT 15 3ia7\m3 to Gtrcw Llie lauie ate herse &c. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies the tufted crowtoe and pale Gessamin the white pinke and y° pansie freakt with jet the glowing violet the well-attird woodbine the muske rose and the garish columbins with cowslips wan that hang the pensive head X weare ^ X weares ^ and every ilower that sad escutchion beare imbroidrie-beates 2 iet-daffadillies fill thire cups w"" teares 1 bid Amaranthus all his beauties shed to strew &c. * what could the Muse her selfe that Orpheus bore the Muse her selfe for her inchanting son for hor inchanting aon did whom universal nature might lament when by the rout that made the hideous roare gone goarie his divine visage downe the streame was sent downe the swift Hebrus to y* Lesbian shoare LYCIDAS November 1637 In this Monodie the author bewails a lerned freind unfortunatly drown'd in his passage from Chester on the Irish seas 1637. Yet once more O ye laurells, and once more yee myrtles browne w* I vie never seare i6 "LYCIDAS" I come to pluck y' berries harsh and crude , and w"" forct fingers rude shatter y' leaves before the mellowing yeare. bitter constraint, and sad occasion deare -''^ompells me to disturb y' season due for Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime young Lycidas, and hath not left his peere who would not sing for Lycidas ? he well knew himselfe to sing, and build the lofty rime he must not flote upon his watrie beare unwept, and welter to the parching wind without the meed of some melodious teare Begin then Sisters of the sacred well that from beneath the seate of Jove doth spring begin, and somewhat loudly sweepe the string hence w* denial vaine, and coy excuse so may some gentle muse w''' luckie words favour my destin'd urne and as he passes turne and te bid faire peace be to my sable shroud for we were nurs'd upon the selfe same hill fed y= same flock by fountaine, shade, and rill Together both ere the high lauris appear'd under the glimmering eylids of the morne wee drove afeild, and both together hearde what tyme the gray fly winds her sultrie home batning our flocks w* the freshe dews of night the oft till «¥% starre bright that rose in Evening bright THE ORIGINAL DRAFT 17 toward heavens dfescent had sloapt his buiTiishtid westnng ^ weele ' meane while the rural dittip^ were not mute ^-"^ tempd to th' oaten flute/^ rough Satyrs danc't; fand Fauns w* clov'en heele \ from the glad sound would not be absent long and old Damoetas lov'd to heare our song But O the heavie change now thou art gone gone now thou art gon, and never must returne thee shepheard, thee the woods and desert caves w* wild Thyme, and the gadding vine oregrown ^^ and all thire Ecdicr Echo's mourne the willows, and the hazel copses greene \/ shall now no more be seene fanning thire joyous leaves to thy soft lays, ^/ as killing as the canker to the rose or taint-worme to the weanling heards that graze or frost to flowrs that thire gay bulLuiib ^ weare bcarc wardrope "^ weare when first the white thorne blows such Lycidas thy losse to shepheards eare where were yee nymphs when y° remorselesse deepe clos'd ore the head of y" yuun loved Lycidas for neither were yee playing on th'e steepe where y' old bards the famous Druids lie nor on the shaggie top of Mona high •y 1 8 "LYCIDAS" nor yet where Deva spreds her wisard streame ay mee I fondly dreame had yee bin there for,what could that have don ywh a t could the golden h a yrd Callinpf for her inchanting son when she beheld (the gods farre sightpH hee) his goarie scalpe rowle downe the Thrarian lee # whome universal nature might lament and hoaven and h e ll deplor e wh e n hie divin e hoad dowTio the streame was sent downe the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore [The asterisk refers back to the fourth fragment (see p. 13).] Alas what boots it w"" incessant care to tend the homely slighted shepheards trade and strictly meditate the tbanklesse muse were it not better don as others use to sport w* Amaryllis in the shade y or with hid in the tangles of Neaera's haire fame is the spurre that the cleere spirit doth raise (that last infirmitie of noble mind) to scorne delights, and live laborious days but the faire guerdon when wee hope to find and thinke to burst out into sudden blaze comes the blind Furie w"' th' abhorred sheares and slits the thin-spun life. But not the praise Phoebus repli'd, and touch't my trembling eares, on Fame is no plant that grows a mortall soile nor in the glistering foile THE ORIGINAL DRAFT 19 set off to th' world, nor in broad rumor lies but lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes and pfect witness of all-judging Jove as he pronounces lastly on each deed of so much praise in heav'n expect thy meed v — ■^ Oh Fountain Arethuse and thou smo ot h flood fenrt honour'd mooth soft sliding Mincius crown'd w* vocall reeds , that straine I heard was of a higher mood but now my oate proceeds and listens to the Herald of the Sea that came in Neptunes plea / he askt the waves and askt the fellon winds what hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swaine ^ and question'd every gust of rugged wings that blows from off each beaked promontorie they knew not of his storie and sage Hippotades thire answer brings that not a blast was from his dungeon straid the aire was calme and on the levell brine sleeke Panope w* all her sisters plaid it was y' fatall and p'fidious barke ^ built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark ^^ that sunk so low that sacred head of thine Next Camus reverend sire went footing slow his mantle hairie, and his bonnet sedge aeraul'd ora w"" figures dim, and on the edge inwrought "»' like to that sanguine flowre inscrib'd w"' woe ah who hath reft, quoth he, my dearest pledge ^-^ last came and last did goe the pylot of the Galilean lake, 20 "LYCIDAS" tow massie keys be bore of mettalls twain? the golden opes, the iron shuts amaine he shooke his mitre'd locks and sterne bespake how well could I have spar'd for thee young swaine anough of such as for thire bellies sake creepe, and intrude, and clime into the fold of other care they little reckning make then how to scramble at the shearers feast and shove away the worthy bidden guest blind mouths ! that scarse themselves know how to hold a sheephooke, or have learn't ought else the least that to the faithfull heardsmans art belongs what recks it them ? what need they ? they are sped and when they list, thire leane and flashie songs grate on thire scrannel pipes of wretched straw the hungrie sheepe looke up and are not fed but swolne w* wind, and the rank mist they draw rot inwardly, and foule contagion spred besides what the grim wolfe w"* privie paw '"^ dayly devours apace, and nntViing sed little but that tow-handed engine at the dore stands readie to smite once and smite no more. Returne Alpheus the dred voice is past that shrunk thy streams, returne Sicilian Muse and call the vales and bid them hither cast thire bells, and flowrets of a thousand hues THE ORIGINAL DRAFT ?i ye valljes low where the mild wispers use V^ n of shades, and wanton winds, and gashing brooks on whose fresh lap the swart starre gparply looks f^intiy \. bring hither all y' quaint enamelled eyes throw •^ that on the greene terfe suck the honied showrs and purple all the ground w* vernal flowrs Bring the rathe &c. [The &o. refers to the third fragment on p. 14.] ' to strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies for so to interpose a little ease let our sad thoughts dally w"" false surmise frail ^^ ye Aymee whilst thee a floods and sounding seas shoares wash farre away, where ere thy bones are hurl'd whether beyond the stormie Hebrides where thou phapps under the humming tide visit'st the bottome of the monstrous world or whether thou to our moist vows deni'd sleep'st by the fable of rm-innpng old Bellerus ^ where the great vision of the guarded mount looks toward Namanco's and Bayona's hold looke homeward Angel now and melt with ruth and O ye Dolphins waft the haplesse youth [Here-halLat_sheeLia-left. blank.] Weepe no more wofuU shepheards weepe no more for Lycidas yo' sorrow is not dead sunck though he be beneath the watrie floare so sinks the day starre in the Ocean bed & yet anon repairs his drooping head 22 "LYCIDAS" and tricks his beames & w* newspangled ore flams in y' forhead of y= morning skie so Lycidas sunk low but mounted high' high through the deare might of him that walkt y' waves where other groves and other streames along w"" nectar pu r e pure his oozie locks he laves & heares listening the unexpressive nuptial song in the blest kingdoms meek of joy & love there entertaine him all the S*^ above in sollemne troops and sweet societies that sing, and singing in thire glorie move and wipe the teares for ever from his eyes now Lycidas the shepheards weepe no more henceforth thou art the Genius of y= shoare in thy large recompence, and shalt be good - to all that wander in that peril/ous flood Thus sung the uncouth swaine to the oakes & rills while y" still morne went out w* sandals gray he touch't the tender stops of various quills w* eager thought warbling his Dorick lay and now the Sun had strecht out all the hills and now was dropt into wcstrcn the wester'n bay at last he rose and twitcht his mantle blew To morrow to fresh woods and pasturs new. [Milton's manuscript breaks up the poem into eleven paragraphs or Strophes. These are followed in the succeeding chapter.] III.— ANALYSIS AND ILLUS- TRATION Strophe I. [I write, r eluctant but compelled, for Lycidas is dead.] Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more,, Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude. And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. 5 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 well knew 10 Himself to sing, and build the lofty rime. He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind. Without the meed of some melodious tear. The opening words, yet once more, remind us that Milton is a Subjective poet. The Objective 23 >v 24 "LYCIDAS" poet altogether hides himself behind his works ; we enjoy his creations, but their creator is out of sight. Concerning Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare (except for the enigmatic sonnets), we only know that they lived and that they died, and that they were a little lower than the angels ; their personality is never revealed, they are Objective poets. Certain other poets in their writings take us into their confidence and speak to us of themselves ; they are ^ubjectiiejiQetg. Such, in our own literature, are Pope, Cowper, Wordsworth, B5n:on, Arnold : such too is Milton. His confidences are not extravagant; but in his sonnets he tells us of his friends, his birthday, his blindness, his dead wife ; descends from the celestial heights of Paradise Lost to the pathetic apostrophe in Book III. So here in Lycidas he invokes the Muse's favour to his destined urn, paints with pastoral imagery his Cambridge life, defends his persistent loyalty to the homely slighted shepherd's trade, twice punctuates lamentation for his friend with an Ay me for himself, poses in rural garb with Dorian lyre in hand as the uncouth s^vain of his epilogue, ending as he began with the reminder that he is no neophyte in the Muses' train. During his seven years of retirement and study at Horton he had written I! Allegro and // Penseroso about 1632, the Arcades probably a year later ; and Comus, performed as a masque in 1634, had just now been printed by Henry Lawes. "Yet once more," then, he will pluck leaves and berries from Apollo's sacred trees ; laurels and myrtles brown — et vos, o lauri, carpam, et te, proximo myrte (Virgil, Eel. ii. 54), and from " ivy," " which rewards the poet's brows " (Horace, Od. I. i. 29). The university degree of bachelor is baccalaureus : its recipients in mediaeval times were crowned with berried laurel. Milton's mind and taste were steeped in classic literature and feeling : apart from obvious adaptations, a flavour of ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 25 Theocritus and Virgil runs through this poem ; and, though Horace was in no sense pastoral, his felicitous epithets and phrases are frequently annexed. In this opening line and a half, myrtles bro-wn is Horace's pulla myrto {Od. I. xxv. 17), while ivy never sere, i.e., evergreen, is from hedera virente, in the same Ode. " Sere " is from Anglo-Saxon sedrian = to dry ; it is found also in Spenser's Shepheards Calendar, i. 37, "my leaf is dry and sere"; and in Macbefh, V. iii. 23, "the sere, the yellow leaf." We observe that line I has no answering rime ; and the same is true of lines 13, 22, 39, 82, 91, 92, 161. He will sing, then, but with reluctance; his song' is premature ; the berries will be harsh and crude, sour and unripe, as in Comus, 479, "feast of nectareous sweets where no crude surfeit reigns." He must shatter the leaves, which are still green and tender, not hardened by the mellowing year. "Shatter" — the first draft had "crop" — is the same word with "scatter"; as shirt = skirt, . shell =. scale. We have it again in Paradise Lost, x. 1069, " shatter- ing the graceful locks of these fair spreading trees." "Mellowing year" (A.-S. meara = soft, Lat. mollis) is a reflection from Theocritus, vii. 85, ctos &pioi'. Yet, though reluctant, write he must: bitter con- straint and sad occasion dear compels. His use here of the singular verb he found warranted by Spenser, P.Q. I. i. 53, "love of yourselfe, he said, and deare constraint lets me not sleape " ; the two subjects forming in his mind a single motive. " Dear " is used in a now obsolete sense for forcible, or cogent: as in Comus, 794, "enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric " ; and as in Prince Hal's reception of his father's expostulation (/. Henry IV. IV. v. 14), " I had forestalled this dear and deep rebuke." For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, etc., is a reminder of Spenser's Sh. Cal. xi. 37, "For deade is Dido, dead alas and drent. Dido, the fairest D 26 " LYCIDAS " May she was that ever went." An emphasis must be laid on his. And hath not left his peer is the quando ullum inveniet parent of Horace, Od. I. xxiv. 8. Who -wotUd not sing for Lycidas is the neget quis carmina Gallo 1 of Virgil, Ed. x. 3. He well knew himself to sing, says Milton : we only hear of King as writing Latin verses, but his EngHsh compositions may have been known to his friends. In the fragment (p. 14), and again in the fair draft (p. 16), Milton wrote "he well knew." The printer omitted " well " ; but in Milton's copy of the printed book, preserved in the Cambridge University Library, he has reinserted it in his own handwriting. He composed by ear, shortening " Lycidas " here, as he shortened Arethuse in line 85 ; as Keats shortened "Pacific" in the sonnet to Chapman's Homer : " He stared on the Pacific, anS all his men.'' The phrase " knew to sing " is paralleled in Comus .• " well knew to still the wild waves when they roar." Build the lofty rime may have been suggested by Euripi. Supplices, 996, dotSas ioTrupywa-ev, "reared the song," or from Horace, Epist. I. iii. 24, "condis amabile carmen." Milton rightly wrote rime, from A.-S. y?w = number. "Rhyme" is a mis-spelling, not found earlier than 1550, from confusion with "rhythm." Bier, written beare by Milton, is from A.-S. 6eran = to bear, Lat. fer, Gr. ep. Welter is the English form of German wealtan = to roll, whence "wallow" and "waltz." Meed of some melodi- ous tear is like the debita lacryma which Septimius was to shed on Horace's tomb {Od. II. vi. 23). " Meed " is A.-S. mid = hire, pay, cognate with Gr. [lurOoi. ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 2f Strophe II. [Help me Muses.] Begin, then, sister s of the sacred well 15 That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring ; Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string. Hence with denial vain and coy excuse : So may some gentle Muse With lucky words favour my destined urn, 20 And, as he passes, turn. And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud Begin then is the usual pastoral opening; the 4/3X£re^ Mi;tcra6 of Theocritus, the Indpe Musa of Virgil. By the sacred "well may be meant the Pierian spring below Olympus, or Aganippe, the "Helicon's harmonious spring" of Gray's Ode, Ooy is from Latin quietus = shy, withdrawing, un- obtrusive. Lucky "words is the Latin bona verba. Ill-omened words, intentional or accidental, were held fatal to the effectiveness of a sacred rite. Male ominatis parcite verbis, "a truce to ill-omened words," cp. Horace (pd. III. xiv. 2), and the liturgical Favete Unguis, "speak lucky words or none" {Od. III. i. 2), was a charge pronounced by the priest in opening the Mysteries. In my destined urn the "my" is emphatic. Sable shroud is a black funeral pall.' Sobole is the name given in Russia to the little animal {Mustela zibellind) which yields the precious fur : and, the black skins being the most valuable, the adjective was used to mean black. "Shroud" (A.-S. screade) is a garment; here used for a mprtcloth: it was originally "a torn off frag- ment," so akin to " shred." 28 "LYCIDAS" Strophe III. [Our happy College life.] For we were nu rsed upon the self-same hill, FeJT^esame flock, by fountain, shade, and rill ; Together both, ere the high lawns appeared 25 Under the opening eyelids of the Morn, We drove a-field, and both together heard What time the grey-fly winds her sultry Jwrn, Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night, Oft till the star that rose at evening bright 30 Towards heaven's descent had sloped his westering wheel. Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute ; Tempered to the oaten flute Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven heel From the glad sound would not be absent long; 35 And old Damcetas loved to hear our song. It is told, in pastoral language, not perhaps with- out a certain loss of force. The college com- panionship of the two students, prolonged often till late into the night, is described as nocturnal sheep- folding j their mutual study and converse are rural ditties on the oaten flute ; their associates are the Satyrs and Fauns by Dian set To keep rough hills and forest holts (Polyolbion, 1. 24) ; the tutor, or director of their reading, is an old shepherd Damoetas. The high la'wns on which the pair fed their flocks stood for any kind of grassy ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 29 field, as in L' Allegro, 71, "russet lawns and fallows grey." The word is M.E. laund, O.Fr. lande = a. space of grassy ground, identical with our land. The opening eyelids of the morn stood first as "glimmering" eyelids. The phrase is from Job III. 9, retained in our version as a marginal read- ing forjiie less picturesque "dawning of the day"; it. occurs again in the text of xli. 18. The image had been used in Comus, 1. 978, "where day never shuts his eye"; in // Penseroso, 1. 14, "Hide me from day's garish eye," and in the Sonnet to the Nightingale, whose liquid notes "close the eye of day." Jeremy Taylor, in the Holy Dying (p. 17, Pickering), writes "The Sun .... opens a little eye of day." In "we drove a-field the prefix a = on, as in " amain," 1. in. What time, in the line follow- ing, is a Latinism, quo tempore. So Comus, 291, "what time the laboured ox in his loose traces from the furrow came." The grey-fly is the gnat. Battening our flocks has the same meaning, though not the same derivation, as "fattening." Its root is bat, = good, prosperous, the positive form of better and best. The star that rose at evening bright is Hesperus ; the " star that bids the shepherd fold" of Comus, 93. In sloped his "westering "Wheel, " sloped " is from A.-S. slipan = to slip ; but Milton uses it here as a transitive verb ; in Comus, 98, turns it into an adjective, "and the slope sun his upward beam shoots against the dusky pole." " His," is the old and correct possessive case of the third personal pronoun hit. "Its" was a late corruption, not older than the end of the i6th century. The word occurs only once in our Bible version, Leviticus XXV. 5, "that which groweth of its own accord," this being an alteration of the printers from the original "his." It is rarely found in Shakespeare, is used three times by Milton, P.L. I. 254; IV. 813; Hymn on the Nativity, 1. 106; when Dryden wrote 30 " LYCIDAS " it had established itself. (See I. 97). In the rural ditties .... tempered to the oaten flute -we have a reflex of Horace's dulcem qua strepitum Fieri temperas {Od. IV; iii. loi), "who temperest the dulcet sounds of the golden shell." " Ditties," Latin (^zV/a, = utterances, is usually, as here, confined to sbngs. The "oaten flute," or rather flageolet, is the pastoral pipe or tibia. It was made of hollow cane, reed, bone ; most simply from straw of oat. Sometimes it was a single pipe, sometimes double, biforem dat tibia cantum {^n. IX. 618), sometimes sevenfold, when it was known zs, fistula. Est mihi disparibus septem compacta cicutis fistula (Virgil, Ed. II. 35), the iTvpi^ or pan-pipe of the Greeks (Theocritus I. 3, etc.) In Virgil it is often called Avena (Ed. I. 2), and becomes Oat in English poetry. Spenser (F.Q_. I. 3) has "for trumpet sterne to change tny oaten reedes." Again in Lycidas 88; and in Collins' exquisite Ode to Evening, "If aught of oaten reed or pastoral stop." The Satyrs and Fauns represent, as has been said, the fellow-collegians who came to hear and share the two young men's talk — "A band Of youthful friends, on Mind and Art And Labouf, and the changing mart. And all the framework of the land. So in Ed. VI. 27, when Silenus begins to sing, the Fauns throng to listen; Turn vera in numerum Faunosque ferasque videres ludere. The Satyrs were the rural deities of Greece, identical with the Latin Fauns. By Old Damoetas may be meant Chappell, Milton's tutor at Christ's ; or, as Milton is said heartily to have disliked him, more probably Bambridge, Master of the College, whom he respected. Damoetas is a shepherd in Theocritus, Idyll VI., in Virgil, Ed. III. In Ed. II. 37 he is described as an old shepherd, who, when dying, bequeaths his fistula to Corydon. ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 31 Strophe IV. [Tears for his loss.] But, ok ! the heavy change, now thou art zone Now thou art gone and never must return 1 Thee, shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves, With wild thyme and the gadding vine over- grown, 40 And all tlieir echoes mourn. The willows, and the 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, 45 Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze, Or frost to flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear, Wlten first the white-tJwrn blows ; Such, Lycidas, tky loss to shepherd's ear. Thee, shepherd, thee, is a familiar rhetorical repetition. So Horace, Od. II, iv. 21, Vaster, CamcRncR, vester ; and Virgil, Georg. IV. 466, Te veniente die, te decedente canebat. For the 'virocds and desert caves, and all their echoes we turn to Bion, Adonidis Epitaphium : — Sipea. irdvTa XeyovTi Kal ai Spves " at rbv "ASkoviv," Kal voTafx,oi KkaiovTi to, irlvdea ras A^/joStVas, Kal irayat tov "ASoiviv iv &pe(Ti SaKpiiovTi, axil S' avTij36cuT£v " aTTciJAeTO KaA.os'ASwj'is." ^ The phrase itself is probably Horace's nemora aut specus, Od. III. XXV. 2. The gadding wild vine ' Adonis fair the woods and hills lament, Venus' lost love the springs and rivers mourn ; Echo returns the cry — " Adonis fair is dead," 32 "LYCIDAS" IS the vitis labrusca of Linnaeus. Virgil cites it {Ed. V. 5), "Aspice ut antrum sylvestris vario sparsit labrusca racemo, " See how the woodland vine over the cave its clusters rare hath strown." It lifts itself to-day on the ledges of ascending rocks, or climbs among the brambles at the mouth of caves. " Gad- ding" is from A.-S. ^a^, = goad, running like cattle stung by a gad-fly. Milton probably had in mind the errantes hederas, the "gadding ivy" of Ed. iv. 19. Canker is from Gr. KapKiv6 HH]«^^Ji ll W ' JI WP«P*^*fgy aeed_^- 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 : 55 Ay me ! I fondly dream " Had ye been there," .... for what could that have done ? WJiat could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore. The Muse herself, for her enchanting son, Wfiom universal nature did lament, 60 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 ? The opening lines are an imitation of Theocritus, I. 66 :— in\ TOK ap ^6', OKa Ad.tj>vi? eraKiTO, ttij ttoko, Ni!ju<^at, ■^ KOTO IIijveKO KaXa r€/j,Trta ; ^ Kara IIi'vScu ; ov yap Sfi TTOTa/ioio pAyav poov etxer' 'Avajro), ovS' AiTvas CTKOTTidv, 01)8' 'AkiSos tepov vS(op.^ ' Where were ye, Nymphs, oh where, while Daphnis pined ? In fair Peneas, or in Pindus' glens ? For great Anapus' stream was not your haunt, Nor Etna's cliff, nor Acis' sacred rill. — CalverLEY. E 34 "LYCIDAS" The lines are rendered again by Virgil, Eel. x. 9 : — Quae nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, Puellse Naiades, indigno cum Gallus amore periret ? Nam neque Pamassi vobis.juga, nam neque Pindi Ulla moram fecere, neque Aonia Aganippe.' So Spenser (Astrophel, 1. 50) : — Ah ! where were ye the while, his Shepherd Peares, To whom alive was nought so deare as hee ? And ye, fayre Mayds, the matches of his yeares ? And we may cite Shelley, Adonais, II. : — Where wert thou, Mighty Mother, when he lay, When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies In darkness ? The adjacent points of land are here enumerated which look upon the fatal sea. Mona is Anglesey, The Steep probably Snowdon ; " Mona on Snowdon calls," says Ossian ; Deva is the river Dee ; Druids is from Druidh, Gaelic for a magician. It has no connection with the similarly sounding Greek or Gaelic words for an oak. The high interior of Anglesey is shaggy, roughly wooded; a reminder possibly of Horace's opaco Olympo (Od. III. iv. 51), or of horridi dumeta Silvani (III. xxix. 23). So in Gray's Bard, 1. 10, "the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side." Shaggy is A.-S. sceacga = \iax: ; hairy and so rough. Shag tobacco is a rough tobacco ; shagreen, a rough leather. Deva's is a "wizard stream, from a local superstition that changes in its fords forbode good or evil. " Wizard" = wise man (O.Fr. guiscard), is from A.-S. witan, to know, Gr. otS, Lat. vid ; preserved in to wit, wist, wot, etc., and in the Saxon Witangemot, wise mens' meeting. Ay me I IjaifUy dream (Gr. oi/;tot) marks by ■■ What groves, what glens concealed ye, watiy Nymphs, When Gallus died of ill-requited love ? For not Parnassus' top, nor Pindus' steeps, Nor Aganippe's stream lent aid to him. ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 35 a rhetorical artifice, repeated, in 1. 152, the abandon- ment of a false surmise; of a thought which the poet could not refrain from indulging, yet felt to be inconsequent — where were the nymphs ? but they could not have helped ; strew the laureate hearse ; ■ but there is no hearse to strew. We may record the same arrest of thought in The Scholar Gyj>sy — " But what ? I d^eam ! two huridred years are flown, since first the story ran through Oxford halls," and the " Ah, vain ! " of a like ejaculation in Thyrsis. What ' could the Muse herself, etc., observe on p. 15 the erasures and attempts of Milton before he could get these lines to his mind. The Muse is Calliope. The two mythical poets of antiquity, Linus and Orpheus, were both sons of Apollo; the mother of Linus was Terpsichore, of Orpheus Cal- Uope — Virgil, Ed. iv. 57. The sympathy of universal Nature with a departed poet is a pastoral commonplace. Says Theocritus, I. 71: — TIJVOV /iav 6toes, rffvov Xvkoi wpvcravTO, Trjvov KbiK Spvfwto Ai(i>v eKXavcre Odvovra TToXAcii ot irdp TTocrcrt^ ySoes, iroXAot 6e re ravpcri, iroWdi Se SdfjuxXai Kai iropries o>8vpavTO.^ So Virgil's Lycoris on the death of Gallus, JScl. X. 13:— Ilium etiam lauri, ilium etiam flevere myricse, Pinifer ilium etiam sola sub rupe jacentem Maenalus, et gelidi fleverunt saxa Lycaei, Stant et oves circum, nostri nee psenitet illas.^ ^ O'er him the wolves, the jackals bowled o'er him, The lioD in the oak copse mourned his death, The kine and oxen stood around his feet, The heifers and the calves wailed all for him. — Calveeley. ° Him wept the laurels, him the myrtles wept, Him Maenalus with all his pines bewailed, And cool Lycasus sorrowed o'er his corpse ; My sheep stood round, and joined their grief to mine. $6 "LYCIDAS" And the thought is caught up by Scott (Lay v. i): — Call it not vain ! they do not err, Who say, that when the poet dies. Mute Nature mourns her worshipper. And celebrates his obsequies, etc. In the rout that made the hideous roar, rout is Lat. ruptus, a confused broken crowd. So Comus enters " with a rout of monsters " : so P.L. vii. 34, " That wild rout that tore the Thracian bard." Orpheus was torn in pieces by the Thracian Maenads, offended at the widower's obtrusive devotion to his dead Eurydice (Virgil, Georg. IV. 520). Spretae Ciconum quo munere matres Inter sacra deum, nocturnique orgia Bacchi Discerptum Isetos juvenem sparsere per agros.* The similar story is told luridly by Theocritus (Id. xxvi.) of King Pentheus, torn in pieces by the Theban Bacchanals. They too " roar " like a lioness when they clutch their prey. So in Psalm Ixxiv. 4, "Thine enemies roar in thy congregation.",^ To be sent down the stream was the fate of Daphnis (Theocr. I. 140) : — Advi.s «)8a, poov fK\viXov avS/ja, tov ov NvfKJxxuTiv aire\drj.^ Swift Hebrus is a Virgilian expression, volucremque fuga prcEvertitur Hebrum, " prevent s ^wift Hebrus in "J «j' her flight." Hebrus would bear the head across the sea to Lesbos, which lies opposite to its mouth. ' Mid Bacchic orgies the mad Thracian dames Dispersed his mangled body o'er the fields. ^ So down the stream Went Daphnis ; closed the waters o'er his head, Dear to the Nine, of Nymphs not unbeloved. ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 37 Strophe VI. [Alas! Death forestalls and cancels Fame. But not so ! Fame is voiced by heaven, not by earth.] /?/^.f / '?i,h.r^.f. finntx it with McessanJ ca/e To tend the homely, slighted, shepherd's trade, 65 And strictly meditate the thankless Muse ? Were it not better done, as others use. To sport with Amaryllis in the shade. Or with tJie tangles of Near ds hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 70 {That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights and live laborious days ; But the fair guerdon when we hope to find. And think to burst out into sudden blaze. Comes the blind Fury with the abhorred shears, 75 And slits the thin-spun life. " But not the praise" Phoebus replied, and touched 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 rumour lies, 80 But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes And perfect witness of all-judging fove ; As he pronounces lastly on each deed. Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed." Alasl wliat boots it? "Boot" is from A.-S. botan =io profit, whence booty, bootless. Meditate the thankless Muse is Virgilian ; Musam meditaris (Eel. i. 2). So Comus, 547, "To meditate my rural minstrelsy." As others use is a supposed hit at 38 "LYCIDAS" Buchanan's lighter poems. " Use " = practise, are wont, is from the low Latin usare, frequentative of uti. Amaryllis is repeatedly named or invoked in Virgil as a beautiful shepherdess. In the shade suggests the grato sub antro of Horace's Ode to Myrrha, I. v. 3. Nesera's hair is extolled by Horace {Od. III. xiv. 21), Di/ et argutm froperet Necerce myrrheum nodo cohibere crinem, "bid silver- voiced Neaera too to hasten and knot her myrrh- scented hair." Fame is the spur, etc., is a reminder of Spenser's Tears of the Muses, 454 ; " due praise, that is the spur of doing well." The clear spirit is a spirit which has run clear of all sordid and selfish lowness; the "free spirit" of Psalm li. 12 ; in Paradise Lost, i. 679, Mammon is called "the least erected spirit." The oft-quoted parenthetic line which follows is nearly always quoted wrong, minds for mind. In Massinger's A very Woman (V. iv. 13) we find "Though the desire of Fame be the last weakness wise men put off" ; and Sir Henry Wotton says of King James I., " I will not deny his appetite for glory, which generous minds do ever latest part." To scorn delights is the omissis deliciis of Horace, Ep. I. vi. 30. The fair guerdon ( = recompense) is derived from the low Latin wider donum, a curious hybrid, composed by Old High German wider =\ids^ again, and Lat. donum, a gift, that is, a gift recovered or returned. The hlind Fury, blind because undiscriminating, is Atropos, who slit the thinspun life which her sisters, Lachesis and Clotho, had allotted and twined. Atropos, as Milton must have known, was not a Fury but a Fate ; they are often confused or joined by the poets, though in strictness the function of the Furies was to punish crime, of the Fates to fulfil Destiny. Horace, in the Archytas ode, ascribes to the Furies human deaths on the battlefield ; and in his preface to Clough's poems, Palgrave speaks of the "blind ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 39 Fury Fate." The intervention, Phcebus replied, and touched my trembling ears, is adapted from Virgil, Ed. vi. 3, Cynthius aurem vellit et admonuit, "Apollo twitched my ear and warned." The glistering foil set off to the -world is the shining metallic leaf used by jewellers to set off transparent stones. "Glistering" is twice used in Cotnus : the transformed monsters enter " with apparel glistering," and in 219 we have "would send a glistering guardian." And in Luke ix. 29, our version reads " His raiment was white and glistering." Of so much Fame in heaven expect thy meed, is expanded in the Areopagitica (p. 45, Osborne's Ed.) into "that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have, shall be the reward of those, whose published labours advance the good of mankind." Strophe VI I. [The sea-gods exculpate themselves.] fountain Arethuse. and thou honoured flood 85 Smooth-sliding Mincius, crowned 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 Neptun^s plea. 90 He asked the waves, and asked the felon winds, What hard mishap hath doomed this gentk swain ? And questioned,every gust of rugged wings TJiat blows frim off each beaked promontory. They knew not of his story ; 95 And sage Hippotades their answer brings, 40 "LYCIDAS" That not a blast was from his dungeon strayed; The air was calm, and on the level brine Sleek Panope with all her sisters played. It was that fatal and perfidious bark, 100 Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark. That sunk so low that sacred head of thine. Fountain Arethuse is the sacred well of Sicilian poetry, and is still visible in a street of Syracuse. Some years ago the sea broke into it, and was walled out; it resembles to-day an artificial garden pond, seven or eight feet square, filled with waterlilies. The story of the nymph is beautifully told by Shelley. We observe that, as the line now stands, Arethuse must be pronounced as a dissyllable. Milton first wrote " Oh fountain Arethuse, and thou smooth flood," demanding a trisyllable; then altered "smooth" into "famed," finally into "honoured." In Theo- critus, I. 117, the djdng Daphnis bids farewell to Arethusa : — Xoi/a' Apedotcra, Kai TroTafjLoi, TOi X^''''^ KaXov koto Qv/J-fSplSo's vSiop.^ To her Virgil dedicates his closing eclogue — ex- trenmm hunc, Arethusa, mihi concede Idborem, "aid, Arethusa, this my final toil." Mincius crowned with vocal reeds, flowed near Mantua, Virgil's birthplace. He three times mentions its reeds: Eel. vii. 12; G. iii. 15; ./En. x. 205. "Vocal" is Milton's own tributary epithet. The reeds are invoked as guiding his recurrence to the theme from the higher mood into which his digression on Fame had led him. "Mood" (Lat. modus) was a term noting the various scales of Greek music, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, adopted thus into early ' Arethuse, farewell, And ye bright streams that pour down Thymbris' side. ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 41 Christian music with its tones or modes. It came to signify any kind of minstrelsy : Horace's Chloe (III. ix. 10) is skilled in sweet songs, dukes docta modos, and he bids Phyllis {Od. IV. xi. 34) "learn of him songs {modos) which her sweet voice may render back." The advent of the gods has its parallel in Theocritus, I. 76, where Hermes, Priapus, Aphrodite, come with herdsmen and goatherds to lament and console the dying Daphnis. The herald of the sea is Triton, son to Neptune and Amphitrite, represented as riding the waves and blowing his wreathed horn. He came in Neptune's plea: to enquire on his Sire's behalf into the charge that the remorseless deep had slain young Lycidas. " Plea " is low ■ Latin pladtum. He questioned the Tvaves, the felon vrinds (low Latin felo = a traitor), the sudden gusts which blow like descending wings from off the land, asking which of them had doomed the gentle strain (A.-S. ddm, a judgment, akin to Gr. Oefiis). The answer that the sea had been calm is brought by sage Hippotades, ^olus, son to Hippotes and Melanippe, a prince whose skill in navigation and meteorology caused him to be mytho-poetised as gaoler of the winds (Odyssey, X. 2 ; and ^n. I. 56, etc.). He reports that not a blast had from, his dungeon strayed; "his" referring to ^olus, or, as in line T,i=its. "Dungeon," sometimes written donjon, may be damns juncta, an appended building ; more probably from low Latin dominionium = lord- ship : it is the chief tower or keep in a castle. Panope was one of the fifty Nereids, daughters of Nereus and Doris, omnis Nereidum Phorcique domus, Panopeaque virgo {y£n. V. 240). The wrecked ship had been built in the eclipse: a phenomenon portentous of evil in classic times ; we remember how in the crisis of Athenian fate at Syracuse, an eclipse, inducing superstitious Nicias to postpone departure, caused the annihilation of his fleet and army. In F 42 "LYCIDAS" P.L. I. 597, Milton speaks of "dim eclipse .... perplexing nations " ; and the witches in Macbeth (IV. i. 316) collect slips of yew "slivered in the moon's eclipse." St James I. 17, says that God, Father of all the lights, suffers no eclipse " (E.V. variableness).. Strophe VIII. [Camus bewails the Cam- bridge scholar; St Peter the intended shepherd of souls.] Next, Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow, His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge 105 Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe. "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 Of other care they little reckoning make Than how to scramble at the shearer^ feast. And shove away the worthy bidden guest. Blind mouths I that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least 120 ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 43 That to the faithful kerdman's art belongs ! What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ; And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw ; The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 125 But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw. Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said. But that two-handed engine at the door 130 Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more'' Next, Camus, reverend Sire, 'went footing slow. Camus is the genius or personification of the Cam, and so of Cambridge. The river is first known as "Granta''; the town adjoining a bridge which spanned the river was " Grantanbrygge," then by a curious transformation " Cantebrigge " — so Chaucer calls it in the Reeve's Tale — then "Cam- brigge," "Cambridge." That Granta and Cam should be the same words is an etymological paradox. The tutelar of the sluggish river comes "footing slow," and we recall Ariel's "foot it featly here and there" in the Tempest, I. ii. Our inter- pretation of the costume assigned to Camus must, in consequence of Milton's habitually loose botany, be in some measure guesswork. The mantle hairy is the rough conferva clothing, the surface of a slow stream at that time undisturbed by oars, as in the "green mantle of the standing pool" of mad Edgar, and Ariel's " filthy mantled pool beyond your cell." Bonnet sedge must refer to the rushes, 44 "LYCIDAS" flags, reeds, which line the river bank: arundineum Camum, "reedy Cam," Milton calls it in his first elegy on Diodati, line ii. "Sedge" (A.-S. J-^^f, = a cutter or dagger, used here as an adjective) was applied of old to any sharp-leaved marsh or water plant. Chapman (Homer, //. II.) makes horses feed on "greatest parsly and on sedge that in the fens is bred." In Wyclif's Bible (Exod. ii. 3), "she took a leep of segge," stands for our E. V., " ark of bulrushes." The name is confined by botanists to- day to the genus Carex. In-wrought with figures dim, stood first " scraul'd o'er with figures dim " ; they are the marks or cracks, somewhat resembling written characters, to be seen on the large decaying leaves of water plants ; supposed, it is said, to have prompted the use of the papyrus leaves as vehicles for letters. That sanguine flower fringing the bonnet's edge would be the wild hyacinth or blue- bell, Scilla nutans, growing on the bank above the river; "sanguine," because the classical flower, whose identity we cannot trace, sprang from the blood of slain Hyacinthus; inscribed -mth woe, because the Greeks discerned on its petals the letters ' Kia.i = woe ; and in his first draft of the plant- catalogue Milton wrote: — And that sad flowre that strove To write his owne woes on the vermeil gfaine. Others read the, marking i.%''Kia.^ = Ajax ; whence Virgil (Ed. l^o€) cites its blossoms as flores inscripti nomina regum, " flowers inscribed with royal names,/ and Linnaeus calls the Larkspur, which he thought to be the flower meant. Delphinium Ajacis. Reft (1. 107) is the participle of reafian, see note on 1. 46. Its past tense, rafl, occurs in JF.Q. I. i. 24, "he raft her horrid head without remorse." The twenty-four lines following (108-131) raise in us, says Mark Pattison, "a thrill of awestruck expecta- ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 45 tioHAwhich "I can only compare with that excited by the Cassandra of ^schylus' Agamemnon ; . . , . in these Unes we have the preluding mutterings of the storm which was to sweep away masque and revel and songs, to inhibit the drama, and suppress poetry. .... In Lyddas Milton leaves behind him for ever the golden age and one half of his poetic genius." The lines are put into the mouth of St Pfeter, pilot of the Galilean lake, who as Chief Shepherd of pastoral fantasy, and^ as historic, guardian of Christ's sheep, bewails the loss of one who must have become a faithful minister in his Church in an age" of* hireling priests. This same mixture of heathen, secular, biblical personages, which Johnson denounced as bordering on impiety, finds precedent in Spenser, who places Peter among the heathen deities, Dido among the saints j a licence employed with sometimes ludicrous effect by the pre-Shakes- pearian dramatists. The pilot bears t'wo massy keys, his Master's legacy (Matthew xsvi. i^). "Massy" is massive, Latin massa = z. lump, so any- thing large and heavy. In // Penseroso, 1. 156, we have "antick pillars massy proof." The golden opes, as in Comus, 13, "that golden key that opes the palace of Eternitie ; " — the iron shuts amain ; "main," Lat. magnus, 'A.-S. mcegen = stt&xxgih. ; so " a-main " = with might. S'wain is a word of Scandinavian origin, meaning lad. Climb into the fold is repeated in F.L. IV. 193, "so since into his church lewd hirelings climb"; as is for their bellies' sake in the sonnet to Cromwell " the paw of hireUng wolves whose gospel is their maw." To scramble at the shearers' feast is perhaps a reminder of Spenser's Astrophel, 1. 31 : " Emongst the shepherds in their shearing feast." Shove is from A.-S. scofian = to push about; whence shovel, sheaf, etc. Blind mouths, which has fed much conjecture, presents no difficulty to those acquainted with the 46 "LYCIDAS" classical use of the word " blind " to express ineffective, useless. In CEd. Col. 183, afjavpi^ x<^^v/^^ ^ ^^^^^ limb ; in the same play, 1639, afiavpoi's x^P^'- stands for blind hands ; and in Hecuba, 1850, we have Tu<^X(j) iro&i, a blind foot. Mouths they are by pro- fession ; but mouths mute and dull, useless as blind eyes. Ruskin treats the phrase characteristically: "A bishop means a person who sees; a pastor means a person who feeds ; the most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be blind ; the most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to "want to be fed, to be a mouth" {Sesame and Lilies, p. 26). "What recks it them ? what concerns it them ? A.-S. recan = to care ; hence reckless : Camus, 404, " of night or loneliness it recks me not" They are sped — "they" emphatic; they have succeeded, gained all they want. A.-S. spedan = to prosper ; so " good speed, God speed you." The attendants on Sisera's mother (Judges v. 30) say to her, " have they not sped ? " Observe Milton's concentrated contempt for the perfunctory utterances of these lazy pastors expressed in the two harsh lines, 123-4. When they list, i.e., wish or please. A.-S. lystan = to desire, whence listless and lust. Their lean and flashy songs grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw : — an echo of Virgil, Ed. III. 2 7, stridenti stipula, " grating straw " ; or of Theocritus, V. 7, Ko.\6.i>.a.dv(i)fia.^ The " mighty goddesses " are Ceres and Proserpine, the divinities of hell. The root of the word is vapKri, numbness or torpor, connected with the Sanskrit nark = hell ; and before the Christian era it was used to deck the bodies of the dead. The Greeks then called the flower " clustering," and credited it with a narcotic effect, neither of which attributes suit the daffodil. Both suit the hyacinth, and that has been supposed to be the flower meant, though, again, the hyacinth of our gardens was probably not vaKwOoi. Theocritus (x. 128^ is thought to mean the, gladiolus, as does Moschus (III. 6). Virgil calls the Narcissus ' purpureus = dark coloured, a term which he also applies to blood; and sera comam = \a.te blooming; neither term appropriate to Narcissus. Fee, in his J^iora de Virgilio, pronounces the first to be Nar- cissus poeticus, an interpretation derided by our horti- cultural authority, Mr W. Robinson : the last he calls N. serotinus, a variety not of the most beautiful kind and difficult of cultivation. Then, if, discarding all these, we fall back upon the hyacinth, what were the "tears" which we suppose Milton to have taken frorh Virgil, forming with gluten the fundamina of the, bees' combs? In our older poets a flower's tears stand for the dew which lies upon the petals. " Why do ye weep, sweet Babes ? " says Herrick to Primroses bathed in morning dew; and moralises sadly on the sight. With more discrimination Coleridge tells us that "dewdrops are the gems of morning, but the tears of thoughtful eve." They ' Blooms ever day by day under the dew of heaven the fair-clustering Narcissus, time-honoured crown of the mighty goddesses. H S8 "LYCIDAS" cling to our hyacinths and may have been used by bees ; but the inverted cups of our daffodil or Lent Lily could not collect or hold the dew. One flower there is which, apart from dew or rain, fills its own cups with secretive tears, Shelley's — That tall flower which wets It's mother's face with heaven-collected tears, When the low wind's, its playmate's, voice it hears. This is the Crown Imperial, Fritillaria imperialis. At the base of its large inverted bells are six nectarifer- ous cavities closely resembling tears. When Christ walked through the Garden of Gethsemane, said the old flower-fabulists, all the flowers bowed their heads except the Crown Imperial, which stood stiffly and unbending, and has wept for its discourtesy ever since. From Shakespeare and others, Milton would have known its name, can hardly have missed seeing it in the Horton cottage gardens; and I submit that, not perhaps, without a glancing memory of Narcissi lacrymas, Milton's weeping daffadilly was the Crown Imperial. W ith thesei_ then._ he will stre'w the, laureate hearse of his dead friend, as Bion, Epitaphium, 75, strewed the body of Adonis : )8oXA,e fie viv a-Te(f>dvouri Kat avOea-i, " bestrew him with coronals and flowejcs." "Hearse" is O.Fr. herse = a, harrow, whence rehearse, to harrow over again. The word came to mean the taper-holding frame oyer a coffin; then the tomb; then the carriage in which, slow through the church- yard path, the remains were borne. " Laureate " is laurel-crowned. In Hucknall-Torkard church lies the body of Byron ; above it no inscription ; but a slab of Greek marble, bearing the poet's name encircled with a laurel crown in shining brass ; the whole sent by Prince Mavrocordato for his friend's obsequies. Thus to honour Lycidas with crowns and flowers will be some comfort, will interpose a little ease. But with the thought comes its abandonment ; there ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 59 is no tomb to decorate with loving adornments ; we do but dally (trifle) with false surmise. Thus Anchises in the shades (/En. VI. 883), calling for heaped Elysian flowers to crown his beautiful descendant, saddens suddenly with the recollection that it is inane munus ; thus Arnold, idealising his Scholar Gipsy as a living man, nay, meeting him on the Hinksey causeway and the ascent to Cumnor Hurst, breaks off abruptly with a — But what ! I dream : 200 years are flown Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls. So, the bones of Lycidas lie all this time full fathom five ; washed whither toy the shores and sounding seas ? northward to the stormy Hebrides ? along the bottom, of the monstrous deep? the belluosus oceanus, the monstra natantia, or the scatentem belluis pontum — monsters of the deep — water seething with monsters — of Horace {Od. I. iii. 18; III. xxvii. 26; IV. xiv. 47)? the monsters hidden by it under its smooth surface — of Virgil, ^n. VI. 729? or, still to our moist (tearful) vows denied, are they floating southward to the Cornish coast ? The fable of Bellerus old is the Land's End, named by the Roman geographers, Bellerium, from a supposed Cornish hero. Milton first wrote "Corineus old," fabled companion of Brut, eponym of Cornwall, whose name still lingers in Cirencester, "Corineus' camp." There, beyond the Land's End, sits the Great Vision of the Guarded Mount, the reported apparition of St Michael's Mount, where the Archangel Michael has been seen by voyagers sitting on the Rock which bears his name ; " guarded " by his presence or by its ancient encompassing wall which still remains. An unbroken line of sea stretches to the coast of Spain, Then Cornwall creepeth out into the western main. As, lying in her eye, she pointeth still at Spain, says Drayton {Polyolbion, XXIII.). The spot indi- H 2 6o "LYCIDAS" cated in line 162 is between 400 and 500 miles away; but an archangelic eye could no doubt penetrate to Namanco's and Bayona's hold, marked in old maps on the western coast near C. Finisterre. The Archangel is besought to " look homeward " ; to turn his eyes from distant Spain, to "look with ruth" (M.E. rewen = to pity) on the mourners here at home ; and, if the lost one's bones are off his island shore, to bid Arion's dolphins waft the hapless youth to his friends. Strophe X. [Apotheosis.] Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, 165 For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed. And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new -spangled ore 170 Flames in the forehead of the vtorning sky : So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves. Where, other groves and other streams along. With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, 175 And hears the unexpressive nuptial song. In the blest kingdoms m.eek of joy and love. There entertain him all the Saints above. In solemn troops, and sweet societies. That sing, and singing in their glory move, 180 And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 6i Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more; Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore. In thy large recompense, and shalt be good Ta all that wander in that perilous flood. 185 This beautiful change o f tone is imitated from Spenser, Hli. Cat. XI. "Dido'is dead I but, into heaven hent. She raignes a goddesse now among the Saintes. I see thee, blessed soul, 1 see Walke in Elysian fields so free : There lives shee with the blessed Gods in blisse, There drinckes shee Nectar with Ambrosia mixt. And joy enjoys that mortal men do misse. Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead. "Your sorrow," = " cause of your sorrow," is the tua cura, " cause or subject of your care," of Ed. I. 58. The whole sounds perhaps an echo further back than Spenser, from the aincient hymn of Callistratus : — •ftiXraT' ApfwSi\ ov TL TTOV TtdvrjKa^i v^crais fJ-eii /JiaKapiav ere i^aaiv ilvai.^ So sinks the Day-star in the Ocean bed is the Sol. Oceano subest of Horace, Od. IV. V. 40, yet more closely of Theocritus, xiii. 49 : — Kar-qpiKs S' Is fxiXav vSmp aOpooi us ore irvpcros a-K' ovpavov TJpmev atTTqp adpoos iv 7r6vT(j)i.^ In repairs -his drooping head, "repairs" is a Latinism; damna tamen celeres reparant cmlestia ^ Not, loved Harmodius, ours to mourn thee dead, Throned art thou in the Islands of the Blest " And down he fell, All of a sudden, into that black well ; So drops a bright star sudden from the sky. To sea. — CalverleY. 62 "LYCIDAS" luna {Od. IV. vii. 13), "loss in the heavens the waxing moons repair," adopted by Gray (Bard 137), "to-morrow he repairs the golden flood," Tricks his beams, sets out, shows; "trick" is Dutch trek = draw out ; so came to mean " set out to advantage " ; in // Penseroso, 125, the morn is "not tricked and flounced." "Spangle" in ne-w-spangled ore is a diminutive of M.E. spang, a metal clasp, hence any shining ornament. "Ore" is A.-S. a^, = brass, connected with iron, and with Latin cer, not apparently with aurum. Forehead is applied in Comus, 733, not to the sky but to the sea — "the unsought diamonds would so emblaze the forehead of the deep"; and Childe Harold, IV. 182, has " Time writes no wrinkle on thine iron brow." Oozy locks is from A.-S. wai'e = moisture ; in M.E. it is wase, applied to the mud of the sea bottom; whence osier, a plant growing in moist ground. Every- one must have been thrilled by lines 172-81, which paint the euthanasia of the dead shepherd. As once before, the poem here mingles classical with biblical imagery, rising from the nectar pure which was the Homeric beverage of Olympus to the unex- pressive nuptial song, the mystic epithalamium of the Apocalypse XIX. 6-9, while the exquisite closing line, and -wipe the tears for ever from his eyes, is an adaptation from Isaiah XXV. 8, and Rev. VII. 17. With it we shall perhaps think that the Strophe might have ended; in the four lines which follow is something of the anti-climax discerned by Addison in the two closing lines of Paradise Lost. The curious word " unexpressive," = ineffable, is used earlier by Milton in his Hymn on the Nativity, 116, "harping in loud and solemn quires with unexpressive notes." Shakespeare has it in As you Like It, III. i. 28; "the fair, the chaste, the unexpressive She." In the Genius of the Shore we relapse again from Scriptural to ANALYSIS AND ILLUSTRATION 63 pagan imagery. The Genius was the tutelary spirit of a person or of a place. Shakespeare uses it more than once in the former sense ; " the Genius and the mortal instruments are then in Council " {J. Ccesar, IL i.). Milton quotes it in II Penseroso, 154, "the unseen Genius of the wood;" dismisses it from the advent of the new-born Christ, Hymn Nat. 116 : — From haunted spring, and dale Edged with poplar pale. The parting Genius is with sighing sent ; should perhaps not have revived it here. The invo- cation to the spirit of the wrecked voyager to succour wanderers on the shore, may be due to a Latin eclogue by Sannazaro, the "Christian Virgil" at the Court of Naples in the sixteenth century, numen aquarun semper eris, semper Icetum piscantihus omen, "the Genius of the waters ever shalt thou be, to fishers ever a protecting sign " ; perhaps to Virgil, Ed. VI. 64, where Menalcas prays that dead Daphnis will be good to his fellow-swains, sis bonus, o felixque tuts. In large recompense, large is Latin largus = bountiful. Strophe XI. [Epilogue.] Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills. While the still morn went out with sandals grey : He touched the tender stops of various quills. With eager thought warbling his Doric lay : And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, 190 And now was dropped into the western bay. At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue : To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. 64 "LYCIDAS" The ecstasy of the verse has spent itself; we close with a resumption of the pastoral machinery. Modestly the poem is ascribed to an uncouth STvain, some Hobbinol or Cohn, the accepted lay figure of bucolic minstrelsy or dialogue. " Uncouth " is = unknown, negative of afM = known, from A.-S. cunnan, whence ken. The notion of odd or strange, as in uncanny, was attached to it later. In L' Allegro, 5, "some uncouth cell" bears the original meaning. "Swain," A.-S. swan, means a lad, allied to Gothic swing =s\.rong. The swain is supposed to have begun his song at early dawn, when the still mom ■went out -with sandals grey. So in Paradise Regained, IV. 427, "Morning fair came forth with pilgrim steps in amice grey." All day long he had piped, and sung his Doric lay. "Doric," from the Dorian founders of pastoral poetry (p. 10) ; as, in Theocritus' epithalamium to Helen, 47, the brides- maids carve on a plane tree, "in Doric characters legibly," the legend a-i^ov /*£, 'EAeVas