14. 4. shapes. Com. 207. Comp. Virg. Æn. vi. 285.

5. uncouth cell. Elsewhere Milton speaks of "the uncouth swain" (Lc. 185); a voyage uncouth" (Paradise Lost, v. 98); "this uncouth dream." Radically, uncouth = unknown. Couth or couthe or cowthe occurs as a pres., as a pret., and as a part. As a pres. it has in Piers Ploughman, Ed. Skeat, v. 181, a causative force:

I couth it in owre cloistre, that al owre couent wote it."

As a pret. we still retain it in our could. (Comp. Lycidas: "he knew himself to sing "= he could sing.) As a part. in Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, Ed. Morris, 1490, &c. Strictly it is the pret. of Ang.-Sax. cunnan; see note on wont, Protkal. 139. Uncouth survives in Lowland Scotch as "unco'."

6. brooding: not literally so, as in Paradise Lost, i. 21, or it would be her, not his, jealous wings; but as it were in a brooding, i.e overcovering, attitude. So incubo in Latin, as En. i. 89: "Ponto nox incubat atra;" vi. 610: "Qui divitiis soli incubuere repertis." There is another secondary meaning the word sometimes has, viz. to meditate or ponder mischievously or sullenly. Except when used literally it has seldom or never a good sense. his. See note on Hymn Nat. 106. Probably in using "his" with reference to Darkness he has in mind the classical Erebus.

7. Sec 2 Henry VI. III. ii. 40:

"Came he right now to sing a raven's note,

Whose dismal tune bereft my vital powers, &c.

Mach. I. v. 40; Tit. Andr. II. iii. 97; Spenser's Shep. Cal. June, 1. 23:

"Here no night-ravenes lodge, more black than pitche."

8. ebon = "black as ebony" (Love's Labour Lost, IV. iii. 247). So "amber hair," Love's Labour Lost, IV. iii. 86; "raven locks," "eagle eye," &c.

9. low-brow'd locks beetle-browed, overhanging.

ragged. See Isaiah ii. 21.

10. dark Cimmerian. Milton's earlier style is occasionally not altogether free from tautology. See Ovid's Met. xi. 592: "Est prope Cimmerios longo spelunca secessu mons cavus." Warton quotes from one of Milton's Prolusiones: "Dignus qui Cimmeriis occlusus tenebris longam et perosam vitam transigat." See Hom. Od. xi. 14; Tibull. IV. i. 65.

12. ycieap'd. See note on ychain'd, Hymn Nat. 155. See Love's Labour Lost, I. i. 242: "It is ycleped thy park ;" and V. ii. 602:

where Dumain puns:

"Judas I am, ycliped Maccabæus."

"Judas Maccabæus clipt is plain Judas."

Clepe occurs in various forms in Chaucer, and in Spenser. Palsgrave has, "I clepe, I call, je huysche; this terme is farre Northerne." This verb is still used by boys at play in the Eastern counties, who "clape the sides at a game." (IIalliwell.) The word survives also in the Scotch clep, and, as some think, in the English clap-trap.

14. at a birth. A, which is but a corruption of one, here has its full etymological force, as in many current phrases: "one at a time," "a shilling a [on] piece," &c.

The most common account makes the Graces daughters of Zeus, by whom is not agreed. Another derives them from Apollo, by either Ægle or Euanthe. Lastly, there is the account here adopted by Milton, which is said to be given only by Servius in a comment on Æn. i. 720.

17. som sager, so far as is known, Milton's self. Some late editions read "sages," corruptly.

Comp. Soph. Ed. Tyr. 1098.

14. 18. frolick. Here an adjective, as in Midsummer Night's Dream, V. i. 394: "We fairies now are frolick." Com. 59: Ripe and frolick of his full-grown age.' So Tennyson's Ulysses," with a frolic welcome." At the close of the seventeenth century it was commonly used, as it now is, as a substantive. A second adjective was presently formed from it-frolicsome. (Comp. gamesome.) Shakspere, Spenser, and others use it also as a verb, as it is still used. The word is of course radically the same with the German fröhlich. Indeed the fact of its not occurring in Ang.-Sax. and its form suggest, that it is simply fröhlich imported into English, the c representing the guttural. The term lic is not uncommon in Ang.-Sax., as gastlic (comp. German geistlich), but in later English it is generally softened away into ly: thus gastlic becomes ghastly, nihtlic nightly, &c.

20. a Maying. This a is a corruption of on. See note on Hymn Nat. 1. 207. So in "a dying," Luke viii. 42; Shakspere's Richard II. II. i. 90; "a fishing," John xxi. 3. In the words alive, aloft, apart, aslant, abroad, away, aground, the prep. and its noun are fused together, as also in the wholly or partly obsolete words abed, afire, afoot, athirst, acold, acool, aflame, agape.

Maying. See Chaucer's Knight's Tale; Herrick's Hesperides, passim, &c. For some account of the old May-day customs see Ellis's Brand's Popular Ant. Warton well refers to Ben Jonson's Masque at Sir W. Cornwallis' house at Highgate, 1604.

[What is the force of once here? What other forces has it?]

21. [What is meant here by there?]

22. See Taming of the Shrew, II. i. 173:

"I'll say she looks as clear

As morning roses newly wash'd in dew."

24. [Explain the so here.]

bucksom. This word is here, as many a time since, used somewhat vaguely. It is the Ang.-Sax. bocsum, and means radically bow-some, flexible, pliant; German, beugsam, diegsam. Then it means yielding, and so obedient, in which senses it is frequently used by Chaucer and our older writers. Thus, Spenser, View of the State of Ireland: "Thinking thereby to make them the more tractable and buxom to his government." "In an old form of marriage used before the Reformation the bride promised to be obedient and buxom in bed and board.' (Johnson.) See other instances in Trench's Sel. Gloss. See also Will. Pal. Ed. Skeat, 2943:

"The proddest of them alle

Schul be buxum at your wille."

In the Vision of Piers Ploughman is found unbuxome for disobedient. See also Faerie Queene, I. xi. 37:

(Which phrase occurs

aëra," Sat. II. ii. 13.)

"Then gan he tosse aloft his stretched traine,

And therewith scourge the buxome aire so sore,
That to his force to yielden it was faine."

also in Paradise Lost, ii. 842 and v. 270; comp. Horace's "sedentem
Faerie Queene, III. ii. 23:

"Imperious Love

tyrannizeth in the bitter smarts

Of them that to him buxome are and prone.'

Perhaps because obedience was in the old days considered the great charm of a woman (see Taming of the Shrew), the word came to be used in a general complimentary sense. Gower, in Shakspere's Per. I. i. 23, speaks of

"A female heir

So buxom, blithe, and full of face

As heaven had lent her all his grace;"

from which passage probably Milton borrows here. Other old forms of the word are bughsom, bousom. Buxumness is used for obedience in Piers Ploughman, and elsewhere. 14. 24. debonair. See Faerie Queene, I. ii. 23:

"Was never Prince so meeke and debonaire ;"

and elsewhere. In the Boke of Curtasye, 191 (Ed. Furnivall), there is the form boner:

"Gyf hym boner wordys on fayre manere."

25. Haste thee. So "Hie thee," "lie thee down," "fare thee well," &c. In these and all such phrases the pronoun is the ethic dat., as in "he plucked me ope his doublet," &c. Compare "I followed me close," 1 Henry IV. II. iv. 240. "I have writ me here a letter," Merry Wives of Windsor, I. iii. 65, &c. See Fiedler and Sach's Gramm. Eng. ii. 265. So Chaucer's Cant. T. 14,078:

26. Follity. See Com. 102-4.

27. Quips. See Alex. and Camp. apud Nares:

"Ps. Why what's a quip?

"MA. We great girders call it a short saying of a sharp wit, with a bitter sense in a sweet word."

Two Gentlemen of Verona, IV. ii. 12; As You Like It, V. iv. 79. Greene called a satirical tract he wrote on the affectations of the fine gentlemen of his time "A Quip for an Upstart Courtier." The word occurs also as a verb. See Janua Linguarum, Ed. 1667, § 916: "Be not a fleering jiber at other men; and if by way of discourse thou comes out with any pleasant matter, let them be witty jests (squibs), not scoffing taunts; glance at (allude) but do not gird," where the margin gives for "gird" quip, twitch, carp." Spenser, Faerie Queene, VI. vii. 44, where Scorn,

"Having in his hand a whip,

Her therewith yirks, and still, when she complaines,
The more he laughes, and does her closely quip

To see her sore lament and bite her tender lip."

It is perhaps etymologically but another form of whip. Comp. quirk, twit.

cranks. In Shakspere's Coriolanus, I. i. 141, this word is used for winding passages. In the Faerie Queene, VII. vii. 52, Mutability, speaking of certain planets, says:

"" So many turning cranks these have, so many crookes.'

Milton speaks of "the ways of the Lord" as straight and faithful," "not full of cranks and contradictions." Here it seems to mean turnings, inversions, distortions of what is said: e.g. puns, designed misconstructions, deliberate crooked answers. Comp. the Clown's remark in Twelfth Night, III. i. 13: "A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit; how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward."

14. 28. Warton quotes from Burton's Anat. of Mel.:

"With becks and nods he first began

wreathed smiles.

To try the wench's mind;

With becks, and nods, and smiles again
No answer did he find."

The faces of the personified Smiles are all lined and puckered
Both joy and grief furrow the face, but these

with laughing. Contrast wrinkled care.
furrows are spoken of in very different terms.
29. Hebe. See Class. Dict.
30. love to live
32. Comp. Shakspere's Cymbeline, I. vi. 67:

= are wont to live. So amo in Latin, piλéw in Greek.

"Whiles the jolly Briton

Your lord, I mean-laughs from's free lungs, cries '0,
Can my sides hold to think,""&c.

Midsummer Night's Dream, II. i. 55.
33. trip it.
In Cymbeline, to map it, to prince it; and elsewhere, to go it, to drop it,
dance it ("dance it trippingly," Midsummer Night's Dream, V. i. 403), lord it, saint it,
sinner it, queen it, feast it, wive it, devil-porter it (Macbeth, II. iii. 19), battle it, career it,
mouth it, virgin it, clown it, &c. &c. Perhaps the "it" in this usage stands in the place
of a cognate accusative; e.g. “trip it " trip a tripping; but this being a somewhat cumbrous
phrase the substantive is displaced by the pronoun. In other words, the "it" represents a
substantive implied in the governing verb (so, in Greek any y' ériσev, Soph. Ed. Tyr. 810,
ἴσην agrees with τίμην contained in ἔτισεν, &c.).

=

34. Contrast "the even step and musing gate” in Il Penseroso, 38. Comp. Com. 144:

and 962:

"Beat the ground

In a light fantastic round;"

"Here be, without duck or nod,

Other trippings to be trod
Of lighter toes."

36. Is he thinking of Wales, Switzerland, Greece, and other mountainous countries, in which the heights have proved the great strongholds of freedom? Or does he refer to the absence of conventional restraints and general sense of unconfinement that belong to mountains? Comp. Keble's Christian Year:

"What liberty so glad and gay,

As where the mountain boy,
Reckless of regions far away,
A prisoner lives in joy," &c.

No such nymph is found amongst the acknowledged Oreads and Orodemniads of the Greeks. Libertas had a temple built to her on the Aventine Hill at Rome. But the first interpretation suggested is probably the correct one. Comp. Byron's

with Wordsworth's

"The mountains look on Marathon,

And Marathon looks on the sea,"

"Two Voices are there-one is of the sea,
One of the mountains- each a mighty voice:
In both from age to age thou didst rejoice,
They were thy chosen music, Liberty," &c.

Add Tennyson's

"Of old sat Freedom on the heights,

The thunder breaking at her feet;
Above her shook the starry lights,

She heard the torrents meet."

15. 38. crue. Crew signifies radically any gathering or assembly. It is probably connected with crowd. In modern English it has mostly a bad sense, when used generally.

40. unreproved unreprovable. So in Spenser, "unreproved truth." Comp. the use

of invictus in Latin.

unreproved pleasures free. On this favourite word-order of Milton see Hymn

Nat. 187.
42. Comp. Shakspere's Henry V. IV. i. 11:

43. Comp. "From his high watch-tower in the heavens." (Milton's Reformation touching Church Discipline in England.)

44. Comp. Shakspere's Much Ado About Nothing, V. iii. 25:

"The gentle day,

Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about

Dapples the drowsy East with spots of grey."

45. The verb "to come" depends upon the verb "to hear" in 1. 41. He wishes to hear the lark begin its flight, and then to hear it come to his window and give him "good " before "6 morning." The "to" "" come is made necessary by the distance between it and the governing verb; otherwise, it would be omitted according to our usage after "hear" just as after may, can, see, &c. (We say "I made him come; " but "I compelled him to come.") The lark, then, is to greet the poet. Comp. a sprightly song by T. Heywood, apud The Golden Treasury:

"Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day,

With night we banish sorrow;

Sweet air, blow soft, mount larks aloft
To give my love good morrow.'

In Paradise Regained, ii. 279–281, the lark is to salute the Morning's self:

"And now the herald lark

Left his ground-nest [comp. Com. 317], high towering to descry
The Morn's approach, and greet her with his song."

Other interpretations of this passage have been suggested by those reluctant to allow the ignorance of a lark's habits—the untruthfulness to nature-shown by Milton, if the above construction be adopted. The "to come" has been made dependent upon "admit me," in 1. 38, and it has been maintained that it is the poet who is to say 'good morrow." The poet is supposed to be out of doors, and to visit his own window. But (1) "at my window" should rather be "at my own window ;" (2) to whom is he to bid good morrow? Another suggestion supposes him to be in doors, to go to his window, and bid good morrow to the world at large! No; the poet evidently means that the lark is to descend and perch for a moment upon his window-sill.

Warton quotes from Sylvester's Du Bartas in the Cave of Sleep:

and

"Cease, sweet chantecleere,

To bid good morrow."

"But cheerful birds chirping him sweet good morrows."