LVIII. Invocation to Light. 1. See preceding note. 2. The meaning is that light is the eldest child of heaven, or perhaps may be called the co-eternal beam of the Eternal God, since God is light. 3. That is, 'or art thou rather to be called the pure ethereal stream whose fountain is unknown?' See Job xxxviii. 19. Hearest thou? in the sense of art thou called? is one of the many Latin idioms that are found in Milton. 4. The Stygian pool, i.e. hell. In the previous part of the poem Milton has sung of hell and of the fallen angels, and of the journey of Satan through Chaos in search of the earth. It is to this that the next two lines refer. Stygian, from Styx, the river that ran seven times round the lower world that was the mythological abode of the dead. 5. Though blind, the poet will wander in thought by the springs and groves of Greece-the haunt of the Muses-but chiefly by the brook Kidron and the pool of Siloam near Jerusalem. 6. Thamyris: a Thracian bard who was blinded for his conceit in thinking that he could sing better than the Muses. Mæonides: Homer. Tiresias: a famous blind prophet at Thebes. Phineus: a blind soothsayer contemporary with the Argo nauts. LIX. Lament of Samson. 1. Samson Agonistes: i.e. Samson the Athlete, a dramatic poem on the model of a Greek play, representing the destruction of the Philistines by the blind Samson. This passage is spoken by Samson in the poem, but has several autobiographical references to Milton. For the poem was published in 1671, when Milton was blind, and when the restoration of the Monarchy had blighted the hopes of political and religious purity and freedom for which he had sacrificed so much. 2. Silent as the moon when, etc. Professor Masson says of this passage, "The meaning is 'as invisible as the moon is when, from the fact that her dark side is turned to us, she seems to be out of the sky altogether, and lodged in some cave, where she passes the time between the disappearance of one moon and the appearance o. its successor." 3. obvious: literally, "meeting in the way," from Latin ob, near, and via, a way: hence evident. Here the eye is called obvious, because, being "a tender ball," it is in the way of harm. LXII. On the Rights of Colonists. I. In the year 1775. the first shot was fired in the war that resulted in the Independence of the American colonies. For some years previously a bitter feeling. between England and the American colonies had been growing up, fostered by the harsh measures and arbitrary taxation of the British government. In March 1775, Edmund Burke made a last effort to induce Parliament to adopt conciliatory measures. He argued that the Americans had inherited from us a fierce spirit of liberty, which had grown stronger with their growing strength, and now could not be repressed by force; that this naturally caused them to desire a share in the government that ruled them, and that this could best be granted by leaving internal taxation to the Colonial assemblies, and that a liberal and generous policy alone could preserve the integrity of the Empire. 2. Cocket: the seal affixed by a custom-house officer to a warrant that the proper duties have been paid. 3. Sursum Corda: lift up your hearts. LXVI. Sir Humfrey Gilbert. 1. John Davis: an Arctic explorer whose name lives in Davis Straits. He ranks with Frobisher, Baffin and Hudson-heroes of the Northern seas in the time of Elizabeth and James I. 2. The primum mobile: literally the first moved. The old Ptolemaic astronomy imagined that the earth was the stationary centre of the universe, and that round it nine hollow spheres revolved, one within the other. In each of the first seven was one of the so-called seven planets, the Moon, Venus, Mercury, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. In the eighth were the fixed stars, and the ninth or outermost sphere was called the first moved, because it carried all the rest with it in its daily revolution. LONDON RELFE BROTHERS, 6, CHARTERHOUSE BUILDINGS, ALDERSGATE. |