Which is no more than what is false and vain, And merely mortal dross; For, whenas each thing bad thou hast entombed, And, last of all, thy greedy Self consumed, And joy shall overtake us as a flood; With Truth, and Peace, and Love, shall ever shine About the supreme Throne Of Him, to whose happy-making sight alone When once our heavenly-guided soul shall climb, Then, all this earthly grossness quit, Attired with stars we shall forever sit, Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time! AT A SOLEMN MUSIC BLEST pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy, Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse, Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ, Dead things with imbreathed sense able to pierce; And to our high-raised phantasy present That undisturbed Song of pure consent, Aye sung before the sapphire - coloured Throne To Him that sits thereon, With saintly shout and solemn jubily; Where the bright Seraphim in burning row Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow, And the Cherubic host in thousand quires Touch their immortal harps of golden wires, With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms, Hymns devout and holy psalms Singing everlastingly: That we on Earth, with undiscording voice, May rightly answer that melodious noise; As once we did, till disproportioned Sin Jarred against Nature's chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motions swayed In perfect diapason, whilst they stood To his celestial consort us unite, To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light! UPON THE CIRCUMCISION (1634) YE flaming Powers, and wingèd Warriors bright, That erst with music, and triumphant song, I ARCADES AND COMUS In order to understand the task which Milton set himself in the Arcades and in Comus, it will be necessary to glance for a moment at the history of the dramatic form which it represents. The English masque, though it received modifications from native sources, was in the main an Italian product. The southern love of spectacle, united with the Renaissance enthusiasm for classical learning, developed in Italy during the sixteenth century a peculiar species of entertainment, the nearest analogue to which in our own time and country is perhaps the annual Mardi-gras procession at New Orleans. Sometimes the Italian pageants took this precise form of a procession of gorgeously decorated cars moving through the city streets, bearing groups of symbolic figures. Sometimes, on the temporary stage of a ducal ball-room, they took the form of a more coherent series of tableaux, a kind of masque-pageant enlivened by music and dumb-show. Sometimes a connected story was acted out, with elaborate stage devices, and choric and lyric interludes. All these entertainments shared alike the qualities of spectacular gorgeousness and pseudo-classic symbolism. The mythology of Greece and Rome was ransacked for stories which could be suggested by picturesque groups of figures without much action; and upon the devising and mounting of these groups were lavished all the devices of the poet, the sculptor, the engineer, and the costumer. Architects like Palladio did not disdain to design the stage-settings; masters of color like Tintoretto and Veronese painted the scenery; mechanicians like Brunelleschi arranged the machinery; distinguished musicians and choreographs took charge of the dances and songs which enriched the meagre action. All this of course made the masquepageant an expensive form of diversion, open only to rich municipalities, to great guilds or societies, and to courts. It was as an adjunct to courtly merrymakings that the masque proper chiefly flourished. Just as the masque-pageant added to the decorative and mimetic elements of the simple pageant the beguilement of music, instrumental and vocal, so the masque proper added to the masquepageant an element of spoken poetry or recitative, and also gave to the lyric ingredient a greater importance. The services of poets thus came into requisition, and it was at court that the Italian poets were apt to be found. Another reason for the popularity of the masque at court lay in the opportunity which it gave for lords and ladies, who had been blessed with little histrionic genius but with abundant physical beauty, to display themselves in decorative rôles as gods and goddesses, or as abstract virtues and passions. When the masque passed over into England in the sixteenth century, it found there some indigenous forms of entertainment with which it had affinities, such as the pageants of the London Trade Guilds, the Morality plays, and the "mummings' which still survive, if the testimony of Mr. Hardy's Return of the Native is to be taken, in parts of rural England. How far the foreign importation was affected by these native products is uncertain, but there is early noticeable some substantial differences between the English masque and its Italian prototype, due to the peculiar literary conditions of England at the time. Elizabethan drama was just beginning its wonderful career, and a crowd of playwrights stood ready to seize upon any outlet for their talents. It was not long, therefore, before the somewhat crude spectacular displays which marked, for example, the famous visit of Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth, developed in the hands of such dramatic poets as Dekker, Marston, Heywood, and Chapman into more chastened and coherent forms, with a substantial warp of poetry to hold the structure together. Ben Jonson, who as laureate to King James was expected to furnish one or two masques a year for the court, lifted the form out of the realm of the ephemeral, and made it a vehicle for literature. Somewhere in his burly make-up Ben Jonson hid a deposit of delicate fancy and exquisite song, and he fashioned the airy substance of his masques with love, lavishing upon them vast learning and invention. He was fortunate in having as his coadjutors two men of exceptional gifts, Ferrabosco, the King's musician, and Inigo Jones, the King's architect; but Jonson refused stoutly to subordinate his text to the tnusic of the one or to the stage devices of the other. Jonson's example led other poets to give the masque a much more conscientious treatment than it had hitherto received. His work had only to be supplemented by the exquisite lyrical sense of John Fletcher, in his Faithful Shepherdess, and by the magic fancy of Shakespeare, in such masque-like creations as Midsummer Night's Dream and the Tempest, to prepare the instrument wholly for Milton's hand. II The Arcades is only a fragment, and if it had not been followed by Comus, would be of little interest except for the two or three lovely lyric touches which it contains. But as regards the circumstances of their production, the two poems are intimately connected, and any consideration of the one necessarily includes the other. What those circumstances were has already been briefly stated in the introductory biography. It is there assumed, in accordance with the general belief, that we owe the Arcades to Henry Lawes, the young musician whose name is otherwise imperishably bound up with the lyric poetry of the seventeenth century, since it was he who set to music the songs of Carew, Lovelace, Herrick, and other poets of his day. Biographers have attempted to prove, with partial success, that Milton was personally known to the Bridgewater family, and received the invitation to contribute to the Harefield masque directly from them. The matter is of small importance; certainly, from whatever source it came, the invitation cannot but have been welcome to the young poet, for several reasons. In the first place, the Countess Dowager of Derby, in whose honor the masque was performed, had been, in her youth, the friend of Milton's darling poet, Spenser, who indeed claimed kinship with her family, the Spencers of Althorpe. To her elder sisters Spenser had dedicated his Muiopotmos and his Mother Hubberd's Tale, and to herself his Tears of the Muses. Such a connection would have been enough to throw about the venerable lady to Milton's eyes a halo of romantic interest, even had not her subsequent relations with literary men made it possible for Warton to say that “the peerage-book of this lady is the literature of her age." At the fine old estate of Harefield, she and her second husband, Sir Thomas Egerton, had been visited by Queen Elizabeth, and the stately avenue of elms in which the Arcades was afterwards presented derived its name of the "Queen's Walk" from a masque of welcome which was presented there on that occasion. A widow since 1617, the Countess Dowager lived in stately retirement at Harefield, engaged in works of charity. Three groups of grandchildren surrounded And, waving wide her myrtle wand, She strikes a universal peace through sea and land," a description in which it is certainly difficult not to recognize a nymph of King James's court, let down from the canvas clouds of the banqueting room at Whitehall by means of one of Inigo Jones's famous contrivances. Milton, besides, must surely have recognized the peculiar fitness of the masque form for the conveyance of moral and philosophic truth. The purely ideal realm in which the masque moves, and the wide latitude which it offers for the introduction of songs and speeches having only an ideal connection with the action in hand, made it a perfect instrument for the gracious conveyance of a serious abstract lesson. In the fragment of the Arcades which i fell to Milton's lot to compose, he was not free to put it to these high uses. He could only show, in a few exquisite touches, such as "branching elms star-proof," and "By sandy Ladon's lilied banks, On old Lycæus and Cyllene hoar, Trip no more in twilight ranks," that a poet was at hand with more than Ben Jonson's delicacy and more than Fletcher's sweetness. But when in the spring of the next year (if we accept the probable date of 1633 for the Arcades) he was called upon once more by Lawes for the text of a masque, this time to celebrate the Earl of Bridgewater's assumption of the Lord Presidency of Wales, at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire, he was left unhampered to work out his conception, and to charge the delicate fabric of his dream with the weight of a personal philosophy. III In Comus Milton pushed much further than Ben Jonson had done, the supremacy of the poet over the musician and the stage carpenter. Lawes, for purposes of scenic effectiveness, deftly transferred a portion of the lyric epilogue sung by the Attendant Spirit at the close, the line beginning "To the ocean now I fly," to serve as an entrance song for himself, changing "to the ocean "9 to "from the Heavens." In the masque as printed, however, there is no lyric element until the Sister's invocation to Echo. The bulk of the masque is dignified blank verse, unhurried by the necessity for spectacular effect, and with its serious mood unrelieved by lyrical episodes. It is as if the poet had been bent upon showing that he could dispense not only with the trumpery devices of stage mechanism, but also with music, whether his own, in the form of lyrical strophes, or his friend's, in the form of accompanying airs. Not until near the end, when the lesson has been enforced and the action is practically complete, does Milton put |