MacMillan's Reading Books Part 37

But let my due feet never fail, To walk the studious cloister's pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars ma.s.sy proof, And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light.

There let the pealing organ blow, To the full-voiced quire below, In service high, and anthems clear, As may with sweetness, through mine ear Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all Heaven before mine eyes.

And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage.

The hairy gown and mossy cell Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that heaven doth show, And every herb that sips the dew; Till old Experience do attain To something like prophetic strain.

These pleasures, Melancholy, give, And I with thee will choose to live.

MILTON.

[Notes: _Il Penscioso_ = the thoughtful man.

_Bestead_ = help, stand in good stead.

_Fond_ = foolish; its old meaning.

_Pensioners_. A word taken from the name of Elizabeth's body-guard.

Compare "the cowslips tall her pensioners be" ('Midsummer Night's Dream').

_Prince Memnon_, of Ethiopia, fairest of warriors, slain by Achilles (Homer's Odyssey, Book xi.). His sister was Hemora.

_Starred Ethiop Queen_ = Ca.s.siope, wife of King Cepheus, who was placed among the stars.

_Sea-nymphs_ = Nereids.

Vesta_, the G.o.ddess of the hearth; here for _Retirement. Saturn_, as having introduced, according to the mythology, civilization, here stands for _culture_.

_Commercing_ = holding communion with. Notice the accentuation.

_Forget thyself to marble_ = forget thyself till thou are still and silent as marble.

_Hist along_ = bring along with a hush. _Hist_ is connected with _hush_.

_Philomel_ = the nightingale.

_Cynthia_ = the moon.

_Dragon yoke_. Compare "Night's swift dragons," ('Midsummer Night's Dream').

_Removed place_ = remote or retired place. Compare "some removed ground"

in 'Hamlet.'

_Nightly_ = by night. Sometimes it means "every night successively."

_Thrice-great Hermes_, a translation of Hermes Trismegistus, a fabulous king of Egypt, held to be the inventor of Alchemy and Astronomy.

_Unsphere_, draw from his sphere or station.

_The immortal mind_. Plato treats of the immortality of the soul chiefly in the _Phaedo_. The _demon_, with Socrates, is the attendant genius of an individual; with Plato it is more general; and the a.s.signing the demons to the four elements is a notion of the later Platonists.

_Sceptered pall_ = royal robe.

_Presenting Thebes_, &c. These lines represent the subjects of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the great tragic poets of Athens.

_Musaeus_, here for some bard of the distant past, generally. Musaeus, in mythology, is a bard of Thrace, and son of Orpheus.

_Half-told the story of Cambuscan bold_. The Squire's Tale in Chaucer, which is broken off in the middle.

_Camball_, Cambuscan's son. _Algarsife and Canace_, his wife and daughter.

_Frounced_. Used of hair twisted and curled.

_The Attic Boy_ = _Cephalus_, loved by _Eos_, the Morning.

_A shower still_ = a soft shower.

_Sylvan_ = Pan or Sylva.n.u.s.

_Cloister's pale_ = cloister's enclosure.

_Ma.s.sy proof_. Ma.s.sive and proof against the weight above them.]