Horace advises a poet to consider thoroughly the nature and force of his genius. Milton seems to have known perfectly well wherein his strength lay, and has therefore chosen a subject entirely conformable to those talents, of which he was master. As his genius was wonderfully turned to the sublime, his subject is the noblest that could have entered into the thoughts of man. Every thing that is truly great and astonishing has a place in it. The whole system of the intellectual world; the chaos and the creation; heaven, earth, and hell, enter into the constitution of his poem. Having in the first and second books represented the infernal world with all its horrors, the thread of his fable naturally leads him into the opposite regions of bliss and glory. Addison.

1. Hail holy Light, &c.] Our author's address to Light, and lamentation of his own blindness, may perhaps be censured as an excrescence or digression not agreeable to the rules of epic

poetry; but yet this is so charming a part of the poem, that the most critical reader, I imagine, cannot wish it were omitted. One is even pleased with a fault, if it be a fault, that is the occasion of so many beauties, and acquaints us so much with the circumstances and character of the author.

2. Or of th' Eternal coeternal

beam

May I express thee' unblam'd?] Or may I without blame call thee, the coeternal beam of the eternal God? The ancients were very cautious and curious by what names they addressed their deities, and Milton in imitation of them questions whether he should address the Light as the first-born of heaven, or as the coeternal beam of the eternal Father, or as a pure ethereal stream whose fountain is unknown: but as the second appellation seems to ascribe a proper eternity to Light, Milton very justly doubts whether he might use that without blame.

I

description of Chaos, which is said to be infinite, as it extended underneath, as heaven above, infinitely. Richardson.

16. Through utter and through middle darkness] Through hell, which is often called utter darkness, and through the great gulf between hell and heaven, the middle darkness.

17. With other notes than to th' Orphéan lyre &c.] Orpheus made a hymn to Night, which is still extant; he also wrote of the creation out of Chaos. See Apoll. Rhodius, i. 277, 493. Orpheus was inspired by his mother Calliope only, Milton by. the heavenly Muse; therefore he boasts he sung with other notes than Orpheus, though the subjects were the same. Richardson.

17. See also Onomacritus, ATgon, v. 438. The combination Orphean lyre is literally from Apollonius Rhodius, ii. 161.

VOL. I.

15

20

25

Ορφέη Φορμιγγι συνοιμιον ύμνον αείδον. But Propertius also and Ovid have it. T. Warton.

19. Taught by the heav'nly Muse &c.] Not only taught to venture down, but also up to reascend, though hard and rare, which is manifestly an allusion to Virgil, Æn. vi. 128.

Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras

Hoc opus, hic labor est; pauci, quos æquus amavit

Jupiter, aut ardens evexit ad æthera virtus,

Diis geniti potuere.

But to return, and view the cheerful skies,

In this the task, the mighty labour lies:

To few great Jupiter imparts this
grace,

And those of shining worth and
heav'nly race.
Dryden.
25. So thick a drop serene hath
quench'd their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veil'd.]

M

Drop serene or Gutta serena. It was formerly thought that that sort of blindness was an incurable extinction or quenching of sight by a transparent, watery, cold humour distilling upon the optic nerve, though making very little change in the eye to appearance, if any; it is now known to be most commonly an obstruction in the capillary vessels of that nerve, and curable in some cases. A cataract for many ages, and till about thirty years ago, was thought to be a film externally growing over the eye, intercepting or veiling the sight, beginning with dimness, and so increasing till vision was totally obstructed: but the disease is in the crystalline humour lying between the outmost coat of the eye and the pupilla. The dimness which is at the beginning is called a suffusion; and when the sight is lost, it is a cataract; and cured by couching, which is with a needle passing through the external coat and driving down the diseased crystalline, the loss of which is somewhat supplied by the use of a large convex glass. When Milton was first blind, he wrote to his friend Leonard Philara, an Athenian then at Paris, for him to consult Dr. Thevenot; he sent his case, (it is in the fifteenth of his familiar letters :) what answer he had is not known; but it seems by this

passage that he was not certain what his disease was: or perhaps he had a mind to describe both the great causes of blindness according to what was known at that time, as his whole poem is interspersed with great variety of learning. Richardson.

25. The very names of the two great diseases of the eye sufficiently prove that Milton intended to allude to both. Gutta serena is now usually called amaurósis, the darkening or quenching of sight: cataract, (termed by the Arabians gutta opaca,) was called by Celsus suffusio.

A cataract is now usually cured either by extraction, or by comminution, rather than by the method described by Richardson.

26.

E.

Yet not the more Cease I to wander,] This expression (which Bentley and Pearce proposed to correct) may be allowed, if not justified by Et si quid cessare potes in Virgil, Ecl. vii. 10. We may understand cease here in the sense of forbear; Yet not the more forbear I to wander: I do it as much as I did before I was blind.

29. Smit with the love of sacred song ;] So Virgil, Georg. ii. 475.

Dulces ante omnia Musa, Quarum sacra fero ingenti percussus

amore.

30. the flow'ry brooks beneath,] Kedron and Siloah. He still was pleased to study the beauties of the ancient poets, but his highest delight was in the songs of Sion, in the holy Scriptures, and in these he meditated day and night. This is the sense of the passage stripped of its poetical ornaments.

32. -nor sometimes forget] It is the same as and sometimes not forget. Nec and neque in Latin are frequently the same as et non. Pearce.

33. Those other two &c.] It has been imagined that Milton dictated Those other too, which though different in sense, yet is not distinguishable in sound, so that they might easily be mistaken the one for the other. In strictness of speech perhaps we should read others instead of other, Those others too: but those other may be admitted as well as these other in iv. 783.-these other wheel the north: but then it must be acknowledged that too is a sorry botch at best. The most probable explanation of this passage I conceive to be this. Though he mentions four, yet there are but two whom he particularly desires to resemble, and those he distinguishes both with the epithet blind to make the likeness the more striking,

Blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides. Mæonides is Homer, so called

30

from the name of his father Mæon: and no wonder our poet desires to equal him in renown, whose writings he so much studied, admired, and imitated. The character of Thamyris is not so well known and established: but Homer mentions him in the Iliad. ii. 595; and Eustathius ranks him with Orpheus and Musæus, the most celebrated poets and musicians. That lustful challenge of his to the nine Muses was probably nothing more than a fable invented to express his violent love and affection for poetry. Plato mentions his hymns with honour in the beginning of his eighth book of Laws, and towards the conclusion of the last book of his Republic feigns, upon the principles of transmigration, that the soul of Thamyris passed into a nightingale. He was a Thracian by birth, and invented the Doric mood or measure, according to Pliny, 1. vii. c. 57. Plutarch in his treatise of Music says, that he had the finest voice of any of his time, and wrote a poem of the war of the Titans with the gods: and from Suidas we learn that he composed likewise a poem of the generation of the world, which being subjects near of kin to Milton's might probably occasion the mention of him in this place. Thamyris then and Homer are those other two whom the poet