England's Antiphon

Peor and Baälim
Forsake their temples dim,
With that twice-battered god of Palestine;
And moonéd Ashtaroth, the Assyrian Venus.
Heaven's queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine;
The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn;[126 - The Syrian Adonis.]
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz[127 - Frightful, horrible, as, a grisly bear.] mourn.

And sullen Moloch, fled,
Hath left in shadows dread
His burning idol, all of blackest hue:
In vain with cymbals' ring
They call the grisly[128 - Isis, Orus, Anubis, and Osiris, all Egyptian divinities—the last worshipped in the form of a bull.] king,
In dismal dance about the furnace blue.
The brutish gods of Nile as fast—
Isis and Orus and the dog Anubis—haste.

Nor is Osiris[129 - No rain falls in Egypt.] seen
In Memphian grove or green,
Trampling the unshowered[130 - Last-born: the star in the east.] grass with lowings loud;
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest;
Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud;
In vain, with timbrelled anthems dark,
The sable-stoléd sorcerers bear his worshipped ark:

He feels, from Judah's land,
The dreaded infant's hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn.
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide—
Not Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine:
Our babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damnéd crew.

So, when the sun in bed,
Curtained with cloudy red,
Pillows his chin upon an orient wave,
The flocking shadows pale
Troop to the infernal jail—
Each fettered ghost slips to his several grave;
And the yellow-skirted fays
Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze.

But see, the Virgin blest
Hath laid her babe to rest:
Time is our tedious song should here have ending;
Heaven's youngest-teemed star[131 - Bright-armoured.]
Hath fixed her polished car,
Her sleeping Lord with handmaid lamp attending;
And all about the courtly stable
Bright-harnessed[132 - Ready for what service may arise.] angels sit, in order serviceable.[133 - The with we should now omit, for when we use it we mean the opposite of what is meant here.]

If my reader should think some of the rhymes bad, and some of the words oddly used, I would remind him that both pronunciations and meanings have altered since: the probability is, that the older forms in both are the better. Milton will not use a wrong word or a bad rhyme. With regard to the form of the poem, let him observe the variety of length of line in the stanza, and how skilfully the varied lines are associated—two of six syllables and one of ten; then the same repeated; then one of eight and one of twelve—no two, except of the shortest, coming together of the same length. Its stanza is its own: I do not know another poem written in the same; and its music is exquisite. The probability is that, if the reader note any fact in the poem, however trifling it might seem to the careless eye, it will repay him by unfolding both individual and related beauty. Then let him ponder the pictures given: the sudden arraying of the shame-faced night in long beams; the amazed kings silent on their thrones; the birds brooding on the sea: he will find many such. Let him consider the clear-cut epithets, so full of meaning. A true poet may be at once known by the justice and force of the adjectives he uses, especially when he compounds them,—that is, makes one out of two. Here are some examples: meek-eyed Peace; pale-eyed priest; speckled vanity; smouldering clouds; hideous hum; dismal dance; dusky eyne: there are many such, each almost a poem in itself. The whole is a succession of pictures set in the loveliest music for the utterance of grandest thoughts.

No doubt there are in the poem instances of such faults in style as were common in the age in which his verse was rooted: for my own part, I never liked the first two stanzas of the hymn. But such instances are few; while for a right feeling of the marvel of this poem and of the two preceding it, we must remember that Milton was only twenty-one when he wrote them.

Apparently to make one of a set with the Nativity, he began to write an ode on the Passion, but, finding the subject "above the years he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished." The fragment is full of unworthy, though skilful, and, for such, powerful conceits, but is especially interesting as showing how even Milton, trying to write about what he felt, but without yet having generated thoughts enow concerning the subject itself, could only fall back on conventionalities. Happy the young poet the wisdom of whose earliest years was such that he recognized his mistake almost at the outset, and dropped the attempt! Amongst the stanzas there is, however, one of exceeding loveliness:

He, sovereign priest, stooping his regal head,
That dropped with odorous oil down his fair eyes,
Poor fleshly tabernacle enteréd,
His starry front low-roofed beneath the skies.
Oh what a masque was there! what a disguise!
Yet more! the stroke of death he must abide;
Then lies him meekly down fast by his brethren's side.

In this it will be seen that he has left the jubilant measure of the Hymn, and returned to the more stately and solemn rhyme-royal of its overture, as more suited to his subject. Milton could not be wrong in his music, even when he found the quarry of his thought too hard to work.

CHAPTER XV

EDMUND WALLER, THOMAS BROWN, AND JEREMY TAYLOR.

Edmund Waller, born in 1605, was three years older than Milton; but I had a fancy for not dividing Herbert and Milton. As a poet he had a high reputation for many years, gained chiefly, I think, by a regard to literary proprieties, combined with wit. He is graceful sometimes; but what in his writings would with many pass for grace, is only smoothness and the absence of faults. His horses were not difficult to drive. He dares little and succeeds in proportion—occasionally, however, flashing out into true song. In politics he had no character—let us hope from weakness rather than from selfishness; yet, towards the close of his life, he wrote some poems which reveal a man not unaccustomed to ponder sacred things, and able to express his thoughts concerning them with force and justice. From a poem called Of Divine Love, I gather the following very remarkable passages: I wish they had been enforced by greater nobility of character. Still they are in themselves true. Even where we have no proof of repentance, we may see plentiful signs of a growth towards it. We cannot tell how long the truth may of necessity require to interpenetrate the ramifications of a man's nature. By slow degrees he discovers that here it is not, and there it is not. Again and again, and yet again, a man finds that he must be born with a new birth.

The fear of hell, or aiming to be blest,
Savours too much of private interest:
This moved not Moses, nor the zealous Paul,
Who for their friends abandoned soul and all;
A greater yet from heaven to hell descends,
To save and make his enemies his friends.
* * * * *
That early love of creatures yet unmade,
To frame the world the Almighty did persuade.
For love it was that first created light,
Moved on the waters, chased away the night
From the rude chaos; and bestowed new grace
On things disposed of to their proper place—
Some to rest here, and some to shine above:
Earth, sea, and heaven, were all the effects of love.
* * * * *
Not willing terror should his image move,
He gives a pattern of eternal love:
His son descends, to treat a peace with those
Which were, and must have ever been, his foes.
Poor he became, and left his glorious seat,
To make us humble, and to make us great;
His business here was happiness to give
To those whose malice could not let him live.