How first began this heaven which we behold To magnify his works, the more we know : g Much of his race though steep; suspense in heaven, His generation, and the rising birth Or if the star of evening and the moon Haste to thy audience, night with her will bring This also thy request, with caution ask'd, Yet what thou canst attain, which best may serve To glorify the Maker, and infer Thee also happier, shall not be withheld Thy hearing; such commission from above I have received, to answer thy desire Of knowledge within bounds; beyond, abstain And the great light of day. Mr. Thyer is of opinion that there is not a greater instance of our author's exquisite skill in the art of poetry than this and the following lines. There is nothing more really to be expressed than Adam's telling Raphael his desire to hear the continuance of his relation and yet the poet, by a series of strong and noble figures, has worked it up into half a score of as fine lines as any in the poem. Lord Shaftesbury has observed, that Milton's beauties generally depend upon solid thought, strong reasoning, noble passion, and a continued thread of moral doctrine; but in this place he has shown what an exalted fancy and mere force of poetry can do.-NEWTON. Lord Shaftesbury had not a very accurate idea of Milton's genius; which, if it had all the qualities here ascribed to it, was not less rich and gigantic in imagination and invention. h Bid his absence, till thy song End. The sun did stand still at the voice of Joshua.-NEWTON. -et euntem multa loquendo Detinuit sermone diem. To ask; nor let thine own inventions' hope In measure what the mind may well contain ; At least our envious foe hath fail'd, who thought 125 130 135 140 This inaccessible high strength, the seat Of Deity supreme, us dispossessed, He trusted to have seized, and into fraud Drew many, whom their place' knows here no more; i Thine own inventions. 145 130 135 So in Psalm cvi. 29: "Thus they provoked him to anger with their own inventions." -PEARCE The invisible King. As God is styled, 1 Tim. i. 17, "the invisible King," so this is the properest epithet that could have been employed here, when he is speaking of "things not revealed, suppressed in night, to none communicable in earth or heaven," neither to men nor angels; as it is said of the day of judgment, Matt. xxiv. 36: "Of that day and hour knoweth no man: no not the angels of heaven, but my Father only."-NEWTON. See St. Paul, 1 Cor. viii. 1: " k Nourishment to wind. Knowledge puffeth up."-TODD. 1 Whom their place. See Job, vii. 10: "Neither shall his place know him any more."-NEWTON. |