Keep residence, if all I can will serve
That little which is left so to defend,

Encroached on still through your intestine broils,
Weakening the sceptre of old Night: first Hell,
Your dungeon, stretching far and wide beneath;
Now lately Heaven and Earth, another world,
Hung o'er my realm, linked in a golden chain 1
To that side Heaven from whence your legions fell:
If that way be your walk, you have not far;
So much the nearer danger; go and speed;
Havoc, and spoil, and ruin, are my gain."

He ceased; and Satan stayed not to reply,
But glad that now his sea should find a shore,
With fresh alacrity and force renewed
Springs upward, like a pyramid of fire,
Into the wild expanse, and through the shock
Of fighting elements, on all sides round
Environed, wins his way, harder beset
And more endangered, than when Argo 2 passed
Through Bosphorus betwixt the justling rocks;
Or when Ulysses3 on the larboard shunned

1 An idea taken from Homer, Il. viii.

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2 The first long ship ever seen in Greece, in which Jason and his companions sailed to Colchis to fetch the golden fleece. Through Bosphorus," the Thracian Bosphorus, or the Straits of Constantinople, or the channel of the Black Sea. "Betwixt the justling rocks," two rocks at the entrance into the Euxine, or Black Sea, called in Greek, symplegades," and by Juvenal, "concurrentia saxa," Sat. xv. 19, which Milton very well translates "the justling rocks," because they were so near, that, a distance, they seemed to open and shut again, and justle one another, as the ship varied its course this way and that as usual.-Newton.

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3 These two verses Bentley would throw quite away. "Larboard," (he says) is abominable in heroic poetry; but Dryden (as the doctor owns) thought it not unfit to be employed there; and Milton in other places has used nautical terms, without being censured for it. So in ix. 513, he speaks of "working a ship," of " veering and shifting;" and in i. 207, of "mooring under the lee." But he has also two very formidable objections against the sense of these verses. First, he says that larboard, or left hand, is a mistake here for starboard, or right hand, Charybdis being to the starboard of Ulysses when he sailed through these straits. This is true, but it does not affect what Milton here says; for the sense may be, not that Ulysses shunned Charybdis situated on the larboard of his ship as he was sailing; but that Ulysses sailing on the larboard (to the left hand where Scylla was) did thereby shun Charybdis; which was the truth of the case. other objection is, that Scylla was no whirlpool, which yet she is

His

Charybdis, and by the other whirlpool steered
So he with difficulty and labour hard

Moved on, with difficulty and labour he;
But he once passed, soon after, when man fell,
Strange alteration! Sin and Death amain
Following his track (such was the will of Heaven),
Paved after him a broad and beaten way
Over the dark abyss, whose boiling gulf
Tamely endured a bridge of wondrous length
From Hell continued, reaching the utmost orb
Of this frail world, by which the spirits perverse
With easy intercourse pass to and fro
To tempt or punish mortals, except whom
God and good angels guard by special grace.
But now at last the sacred influence

Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night
A glimmering dawn; here Nature first begins
Her farthest verge, and Chaos to retire,
As from her outmost works, a broken foe,
With tumult less, and with less hostile din,
That Satan with less toil, and now with ease,
Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light,
And like a weather-beaten vessel holds
Gladly the port, though shrouds and tackle torn;
Or in the emptier waste, resembling air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal Heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat;
And fast by, hanging in a golden chain,

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here supposed to have been. But Virgil (whom Milton follows oftener than he does Homer) describes Scylla as naves in saxa trahentem," Æn. iii. 425, and what is that less than calling it a whirlpool? And Kircher, who has written a particular account of Scylla and Charybdis upon his own view of them, does not scruple to call them both whirlpools. The truth is, that Scylla is a rock situated in a small bay on the Italian coast, into which bay the tide runs with a very strong current, so as to draw in the ships which are within the compass of its force, and either dash them against the rock, or swallow them in the eddies; for when the streams have thus violently rushed into the bay, they meet with the rock Scylla at the farther end, and being beat back, must, therefore, form an eddy or whirlpool.-Pearce.

This pendent world,' in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.
Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he hies.

1 By" "this pendent_world" is not meant the earth; but the new creation, Heaven and Earth, the whole orb of fixed stars immensely bigger than the earth, a mere point in comparison. This is sure from what Chaos had lately said:—

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Now lately Heaven and Earth, another world,
Hung o'er my realm, linked in a golden chain."

Besides, Satan did not see the Earth yet; he was afterwards surprised "at the sudden view of all this world at once," iii. 542, and wandered long on the outside of it; till at last he saw our sun, and learned there of the archangel Uriel where the Earth and Paradise were. See iii. 722. "This pendent world," therefore, must mean the whole world, the new created universe, and "beheld far off" it appeared in comparison with the empyreal Heaven no bigger than & star of smallest magnitude;" nay, not so large; it appeared no bigger than such a star appears to be when it is "close by the moon," the superior light whereof makes any star that happens to be near her disk, to seem exceedingly small and almost disappear.-Newton.

END OF THE SECOND BOOK.

BOOK III.

THE ARGUMENT.

God, sitting on his throne, sees Satan flying towards this world, then newly created; shows him to the Son, who sat at his right hand; foretells the success of Satan in perverting mankind; clears his own justice and wisdom from all imputation, having created Man free and able enough to have withstood his tempter; yet declares his purpose of grace towards him, in regard he fell not of his own malice, as did Satan, but by him seduced. The Son of God renders praises to his Father for the manifestation of his gracious purpose towards man; but God again declares that grace cannot be extended towards man without the satisfaction of divine justice; man hath offended the majesty of God by aspiring to godhead, and therefore with all his progeny devoted to death must die, unless some one can be found sufficient to answer for his offence, and undergo his punishment. The Son of God freely offers himself a ransom for man; the Father accepts him, ordains his incarnation, pronounces his exaltation above all names in Heaven and Earth; commands all the angels to adore him; they obey, and hymning to their harps in full quire, celebrate the Father and the Son. Meanwile Satan alights upon the bare convex of this world's outermost orb; where wandering he first finds a place, since called the Limbo of Vanity; what persons and things fly up thither; thence comes to the gate of Heaven, described ascending by stairs, and the waters above the firmament that flow about it: his passage thence to the orb of the sun; he finds there Uriel, the regent of that orb, but first changes himself into the shape of a meaner angel; and pretending a zealous desire to behold the new creation, and man whom God had placed here, inquires of him the place of his habitation, and is directed; alights first on Mount Niphates.

HAIL, holy Light! offspring of Heaven firstborn,
Or of the Eternal coëternal beam,

May I express thee unblamed? since God is light,1
And never but in unapproachéd light

Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

1 1 John, i. 5; 1 Tim. vi. 16.

Or hear'st thou1 rather pure ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? before the sun,
Before the Heaven thou wert; and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,2
Won from the void3 and formless infinite.
Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,

Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight
Through utter and through middle darkness borne
With other notes than to the Orphéan lyre

I sung of Chaos5 and eternal Night;
Taught by the heavenly muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to re-ascend,
Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovereign vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,

1 Or dost thou rather hear this address, dost thou delight rather to be called "pure ethereal stream?" An excellent Latinism, as Dr. Bentley observes, Hor. Sat. II. vi. 20:

"Matutine pater seu Jane libentius audis?"

And we have an expression of the same kind in Spenser, Faërie Queen, b. i., c. v., st. 23:

"If old Aveugle's sons so evil hear."

-Newton.

2 For the world was only in a state of fluidity, when the light was ereated; as Moses says, "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters; and God said, Let there be light, and there was light," Gen. i. 2, 3. And this verse is plainly formed upon this of Spenser, Faerie Queen, b. i., c. i., st. 39:

"And through the world of waters wide and deep."

-Newton.

3 "Void" must not here be understood as emptiness, for Chaos is described full of matter; but "void," as destitute of any formed being, void as the earth was when first created.-Richardson, 4. e. the great gulf between Hell and Heaven.

5 Apollonius, Rh. i. 493, represents Orpheus making the creation out of Chaos the subject of his muse.

6" Drop serene, or gutta serena. It was formerly thought that that sort of blindess 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; 'tis now known to be most commonly an obstruction in the capillary vessels of that nerve, and curable in some cases. When Milton was first blind, he wrote to his friend Leonard Philara, an