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Of Stygian darkness spets her thickest gloom,
And makes one blot of all the air;

Stay thy cloudy ebon chair,

Wherein thou ridest with Hecate, and befriend

Us thy vow'd priests, till utmost end

Of all thy dues be done, and none left out;

Ere the blabbing eastern scout 2,

The nice a morn, on the Indian steep
From her cabin'd loop-hole peep,
And to the tell-tale sun descry
Our conceal'd solemnity.-

Come, knit hands, and beat the ground,
In a light fantastic round ».

THE MEASURE.

Break off, break off, I feel the different pace

Of some chaste footing near about this ground.

Run to your shrouds, within these brakes and trees;

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ship, and make a voyage to Lapland; while the third had an enchanted distaff, which not only when she twirled it round, against the course of nature,—

Made one blot of all the air;

but whatever she wished for when the cloud descended, she found at her command when it passed away and light returned. A dame so gifted could not fail to live in case and comfort; and yet, if tradition is not in error, her life was aught but easy and gladsome: her house was mean; her dress was sordid; her meals were scanty; and whenever she moved abroad, she was pursued by the hue and cry of an evil reputation. Of her tricks and her transformations,-how she could turn a fox into a brown colt, and ride it over hill and dale,-how she could become a hare, and set patent shot and the swiftest hounds at defiance, together with many matters more marvellous still,-are they not recorded in that large and unfinished volume of traditionary belief which belongs to the northern peasantry ?-C.

2 Ere the blabbing eastern scout.

Shakspeare, "K. Hen. VI." P. ii. a. iv. s. 1 :—

The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day. -TODD.

a Nice.

A finely-chosen epithet, expressing at once curious and squeamish.-HURD. b Come, knit hands, and beat the ground,

In a light fantastick round.

Compare Fletcher's "Faith. Shep." a. i. s. 1 :

Arm in arm

Tread we softly in a round:

While the hollow neighbouring ground, &c.-T. WARTON.

e Break off.

A dance is here begun, called the measure: which the magician almost as soon breaks off, on perceiving the approach of "some chaste footing," from a sagacity appropriated to his character.-T. WARTON.

A measure is said to have been a court dance of a stately turn; but sometimes to have expressed dances in general. A round is thus defined in Barret's "Alvearic," 1580. "When men daunce and sing, taking hands round." But the most curious and lively description of the measure and the round, is given in a series of fifteen lines, in Browne's Britannia's Pastorals," b. i. s. 3.—Todd.

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d Shrouds.

To your recesses, harbours, hiding-places, &c. So in the " Hymn Nativ." v. 218. Naught but profoundest hell can be his shroud." And see "Par. Lost," b. x. 1068.

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Our number may affright: some virgin sure
(For so I can distinguish by mine art)
Benighted in these woods. Now to my charms,
And to my wily trains: I shall ere long
Be well stock'd with as fair a herd as grazed
About my mother Circe. Thus I hurl
My dazzling spells into the spungy air,
Of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion',
And give it false presentments, lest the place
And my quaint habits breed astonishment,
And put the damsel to suspicious flight;
Which must not be, for that's against my course:
I, under fair pretence of friendly ends,
And well-placed words of glozingh courtesy
Baited with reasons not unplausible,
Wind me into the easy-hearted man,

And hug him into snares. When once her eye
Hath met the virtue of this magick dust,

I shall appear some harmless villager',
Whom thrift keeps up about his country gear.
But here she comes: I fairly step aside,

And hearken, if I may, her business here.

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153

160

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We have the verb, "Par. Reg." b. iv. 419, and below in "Comus," v. 316, where the last line is written in the manuscript, "Within these shroudie limits." Whence we are led to suspect, that our author, in some of these instances, has an equivocal reference to shrouds in the sense of the branches of a tree, now often used.-T. WARTON.

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Adam says, that in his conversation with the angel, his earthly nature was overpowered by the heavenly, and, as with an object that excels the sense, "dazzled and spent."Par. Lost," b. viii. 457.-T. WARTON.

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To cheat the eye with blear illusion.

But

In our author's "Reformation," &c. "If our understanding have a film of ignorance over it, or be blear with gazing on other false glisterings," &c. "Pr. W." i. 12. blear-eyed" is a common and well-known phrase.-T. WARTON.

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And my quaint habits breed, &c.

That is, my strange habits, as Mr. Warton has observed; in which sense, "quaint" is often used by Spenser. But Milton here illustrates himself in the Preface to his "Hist. of Moscovia:" "Long stories of absurd superstitions, ceremonies, quaint habits," &c.

-TODD.

Flattering, deceitful. Spenser, "Faer. Qu." WARTON.

h Glozing.

As in "Par. Lost," b. iii. 93. "Glozing lies." Perhaps from iii. viii. 14. "Could well his glozing speeches frame."-T.

i When once her eye

Hath met the virtue of this magick dust.

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This refers to a previous line, "my powder'd spells," v. 154. But "powder'd" was afterwards altered into the present reading " dazzling.' When a poet corrects, he is apt to forget and destroy his original train of thought.-T. WARTON.

i Some harmless villager.

So Satan appeared to our Saviour in the "Paradise Regained."

That is, softly.-HURD.

Fairly.

NN 2

The LADY enters.

Lad. This way the noise was, if mine ear be true,
My best guide now: methought it was the sound
Of riot and ill-managed merriment,

Such as the jocund flute, or gamesome pipe,
Stirs up among the loose unletter'd hinds,
When for their teeming flocks and granges full,
In wanton dance they praise the bounteous Pan,
And thank the gods amiss. I should be loath
To meet the rudeness and swill'd insolence
Of such late wassailers'; yet, O! where else
Shall I inform my unacquainted feet m
In the blind mazes of this tangled wood"?
My brothers, when they saw me wearied out
With this long way, resolving here to lodge
Under the spreading favour of these pines ̊,
Stepp'd, as they said, to the next thicket-side,
To bring me berries, or such cooling fruit

As the kind hospitable woods provide P.

They left me then, when the gray-hooded Even,
Like a sad votarist 9 in palmer's weed',

1 To meet the rudeness and swill'd insolence

Of such late wassailers.

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175

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In some parts of England, especially in the west, it is still customary for a company of mummers, in the evening of the Christmas holydays, to go about carousing from house to house, who are called the wassailers. In Macbeth, "Wine and wassel," mean, in general terms, feasting and drunkenness, a. i. s. 7.-T. WARTON.

Shall I inform my unacquainted feet.

In the "Faithful Shepherdess," Amoret wanders through a wild wood in the night, but under different circumstances, yet not without some apprehensions of danger. We have a parallel expression in "Sams. Agon." v. 335 :

hither hath inform'd

Your younger feet.-T. WARTON.

n Tangled wood.

"They seek the dark, the bushy, the tangled forest," Prose W. vol. i. p. 13. And see "Par. Lost," b. iv. 176.-T. WARTON.

This is like Virgil's sion of the same sort of the shirt of Nessus. T. WARTON.

• Under the spreading favour of these pines.

"Hospitiis teneat frondentibus arbos," Georg. iv. 24. An inveroccurs in Cicero, in a Latin version from Sophocles, "Trachiniæ,” "Tusc. Disp." ii. 8.—" Ipse inligatus peste interimor textili.”—

P To bring me berries, or such cooling fruit
As the kind hospitable woods provide.

So Fletcher, "Faith. Shep." a. i. s. 1, where, says the virgin-shepherdess Clorin,-
My meat shall be what these wild woods afford,
Berries and chesnuts, &c.

By laying the scene of his Mask in a wild forest, Milton secured to himself a perpetual fund of picturesque description, which, resulting from situation, was always at hand. He was not obliged to go out of his way for this striking embellishment: it was suggested of necessity by present circumstances.-T. WARTON,

4 When the gray-hooded Even,

Like a sad votarist, &c.

Milton, notwithstanding his abhorrence of everything that related to superstition, often dresses his imaginary beings in the habits of popery: but poetry is of all religions; and

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Rose from the hindmost wheels of Phoebus' wain.
But where they are, and why they came not back,
Is now the labour of my thoughts; 'tis likeliest
They had engaged their wandering steps too far;
And envious darkness, ere they could return,
Had stole them from me: else, O thievish Night',
Why shouldst thou, but for some felonious end,
In thy dark lantern thus close up the stars,
That Nature hung in heaven, and fill'd their lamps
With everlasting oil, to give due light
To the misled and lonely traveller?
This is the place, as well as I may guess,
Whence even now the tumult of loud mirth
Was rife, and perfect in my listening ear;

Yet naught but single darkness do I find.

What might this be? A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory",

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195

200

205

popery is a very poetical one. A votarist is one who had made a religious vow, here perhaps for a pilgrimage, being in “ palmer's weeds.”—T. WARTON.

r Palmer's weed.

Spenser, "Faer. Qu." ii. i. 52.

"I wrapt myself in palmer's weed."—NEWTON. * Their wandering steps.

So, in those beautiful and impressive lines, which close the "Paradise Lost:'

They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.-TODD.

O thievish Night.

Ph. Fletcher's "Pisc. Ecl." p. 34, edit. 1633 :

the thievish night

Steals on the world, and robs our eyes of light.

In the present age, in which almost every common writer avoids palpable absurdities, at least monstrous and unnatural conceits, would Milton have introduced this passage, where thievish Night is supposed, for some felonious purpose, to shut up the stars in her dark lantern? Certainly not. But in the present age, correct and rational as it is, had "Comus" been written, we should not perhaps have had some of the greatest beauties of its wild and romantic imagery.-T. WARTON.

"A thousand fantasies

Begin to throng into my memory, &c.

Milton had here perhaps a remembrance of Shakspeare, "King John," a. v. s. 7.
With many legions of strange fantasies,

Which, in their throng and press to that last hold,

Confound themselves.-T. WARTON.

Much of our own island superstition is crowded into these lines it is true that in a city guarded by a regular police and lighted by patent gas, and infested by sharpers and pickpockets, man, even though inclined to superstitious dread, cannot feel fearful of "calling shapes," and "beckoning shadows," and "airy tongues:" but let him have a haunted road-such as that along which Tam o' Shanter rode-to travel on at midnight: let his local knowledge supply him with the recollection of all the misdeeds and murders perpetrated for three miles round let there be a gloomy wood on one side of the way, and an old desolate burial-ground on the other: let him hear a sound advancing behind him, and let him see before him a doddered tree, between him and the blue sky, on which some man within his own memory hanged himself; and if he feels not something like dread upon him, he is either a very bold man or a very unimaginative one. The writer of this has heard an old gentleman, who had served with distinction in the British army, assert, oftener than once, that on riding one night past an old churchyard in a lonely part

Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire",
And aery tongues that syllable men's names
On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.
These thoughts may startle well, but not astound
The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended
By a strong-siding champion, Conscience.-

O, welcome, pure-eyed Faith; white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel girt with golden wings;
And thou, unblemish'd form of Chastity !

I see ye visibly, and now believe

That He, the Supreme Good, to whom all things ill
Are but as slavish officers of vengeance,

Would send a glistering guardian, if need were,
To keep my life and honour unassail'd.

Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

I did not err; there does a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night,

And casts a gleam over this tufted grove:

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of the country, a white phantom started up from among the grave-stones, and stretched a long pale skinny hand towards the bridle of his horse. A pious ejaculation, and the application of the spur, freed him from all danger; but it was evident that he thought the sight he saw was of the other world, and not supplied by his imagination, excited into a creative fit by the solemn hour and haunted place.-C.

▾ Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, &c.

I remember these superstitions, which are here finely applied, in the ancient Voyages of Marco Paolo the Venetian : he is speaking of the vast and perilous desert of Lop in Asa. "Cernuntur et audiuntur in eo, interdiu, et sæpius noctu, dæmonum variæ illusiones: unde viatoribus summe cavendum est, ne multum ab invicem seipsos dissocient, aut aliquis a tergo sese diutius impediat : alioquin, quamprimum propter montes et calles quispiam comitum suorum aspectum perdiderit, non facile ad eos perveniet: nam audiuntur ibi voces dæmonum, qui solitarie incedentes propriis appellant nominibus, voces fingentes illorum quos comitari se putant, ut a recto itinere abductos in perniciem deducant."-De Regionib. Oriental. 1. i. c. 44.-T. WARTON.

w Syllable.

Pronounce distinctly. As in Ph. Fletcher's "Poet. Misc." p. 85. "Yet syllabled in flesh-spell'd characters."-T. WARTON.

Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings.

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Thus, in Shakspeare's "Lover's Complaint,' Which, like a cherubim, above them hover'd." But "hovering" is here applied with peculiar propriety to the angel Hope, in sight, on the wing; and if not appreaching, yet not flying away; still appearing. Contemplation soars on golden wings, "Il. Pens." v. 52: and we have that "golden-winged host," in the "Ode on the Death of an Infant," st. ix.-T. WARTON.

y And thou, unblemish'd form of Chastity! &c.

In the same strain, Fletcher's Shepherdess in the soliloquy just cited :—

Then, strongest Chastity,

Be thou my strongest guard; for here I'll dwell

In opposition against fate and hell.-T. WARTON.

Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud, &c.

These lines are turned like that verse of Ovid, "Fast." lib. v. 545: "Fallor? an arma sonant? non fallimur: arma sonabant."-HURD.

See also note on Eleg. v. 5. The repetition, arising from the conviction and confidence of an unaccusing conscience, is inimitably beautiful. When all succour seems to be lost, Heaven unexpectedly presents the silver lining of a sable cloud to the virtuous.-T. WARTON.

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