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THE NATIVITY.

No war, or battle's sound,

Was heard the world around:1

The idle spear and shield were high up hung;
The hooked chariot stood

Unstain'd with hostile blood;

The trumpet spake not to the armed throng;
And kings sat still with aweful eye,

As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by.

But peaceful was the night,
Wherein the Prince of Light

His reign of peace upon the Earth began:
The winds, with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,

Whispering new joys to the mild ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,

While birds of calm3 sit brooding on the charmed wave.

*

The shepherds on the lawn,

Or e'er the point of dawn,

Sat simply chatting in a rustic row;

Full little thought they than,*

That the mighty Pans

Was kindly come to live with them below;
Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep,

Was all that did their silly thoughts so busy keep.

When such music sweet

Their hearts and ears did greet,

As never was by mortal finger strook;

Divinely-warbled voice

Answering the stringed noise,

As all their souls in blissful rapture took :

The air, such pleasure loth to lose,

With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close.

Nature that heard such sound,

Beneath the hollow round

Of Cynthia's seat, the aery region thrilling,

Now was almost won

To think her part was done,

And that her reign had here its last fulfilling ;

1 At the coming of Christ there was universal peace in the Roman empire under the dominion of Augustus. This was one characteristic of " the fulness of the time.'

A universal expectation prevailed that some great personage was to arise out of the East.-Tacit. Hist., v. 13. Suet. in Vesp. viii. 4.

3 Allusion to the Halcyon.

4 Ancient form of then.

The Greek deified personification of universal nature, from the accidental resemblance of the form of the name Pan for Paon (the owner, the pasturer), to the word Pan, all; the deity of shepherds; an epithet appropriate to Christ as the Great Shepherd; but the heathen name jars on our associations. “Universal Pan" occurs Par. Lost, iv. 266.

p.

She knew such harmony alone

Could hold all Heaven and Earth in happier union.

At last surrounds their sight

A globe of circular light,

That with long beams the shamefac'd night array'd;
The helmed Cherubim,

And sworded Seraphim,

Are seen in glittering ranks with wings display'd,
Harping in loud and solemn quire,

With unexpressive1 notes, to Heaven's new-born Heir.

Such music (as 'tis said)

Before was never made,

But when of old the sons of morning sung,2
While the Creator great

His constellations set,

And the well-balanc'd world on hinges hung;
And cast the dark foundations deep,

And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.

Ring out, ye crystal spheres,

Once bless our human ears,

If ye have power to touch our senses so;

And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time;

And let the base of Heaven's deep organ blow ;3

And with your ninefold harmony,

Make up full consort to the angelic symphony.

For, if such holy song

Enwrap our fancy long,

Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold;
And speckled Vanity

Will sicken soon and die,

And leprous Sin will melt from earthly mould;
And Hell itself will pass away,

And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

Yea, Truth and Justice then

Will down return to men,

Orb'd in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,

1 Ineffable; not to be described; an active adjective used in a passive sense.-See note 7,

P. 87, and note 7, p. 117. oma stanza is a foreshadowing of the scenery of Paradise Lost.

imagery is borrowed from 2 Kings vi. 17.

2 See Job xxxviii. 7, 8.

3 The puritan genius had not yet indoctrinated Milton's spirit.

4 See note 6, p. 45.

Then listen I

To the celestial sirens' harmony

That sit upon the nine infolded spheres.-Arcades, 64.

This is Plato's system.-Warton.-See Plat. Timaeus.

Mercy will sit between,1

Thron'd in celestial sheen,

With radiant feet2 the tissued clouds down steering; And Heaven, as at some festival,

Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall.

But wisest Fate says no,

This must not yet be so,

The bate yet lies in smiling infancy,

That on the bitter cross

Must redeem our loss;

So both himself and us to glorify:
Yet first, to those ychain'd3 in sleep,

The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep;

With such a horrid clang

As on mount Sinai rang,

While the red fire and smouldering clouds outbrake:

The aged Earth aghast

With terror of that blast,

Shall from the surface to the centre shake;

When, at the world's last session,

The dreaful Judge in middle air shall spread his throne.

And then at last our bliss

Full and perfect is,

But now begins; for, from this happy day,

The old Dragon, under ground

In straiter limits bound,"

Not half so far casts his usurped sway;

And, wroth to see his kingdom fail,

Swindges the scaly horror of his folded tail.

The oracles are dumb,

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine

Can no more divine,

With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,

Inspires the pale-ey'd priests from the prophetic cell.

The lonely mountains o'er,
And the resounding shore,

1 Psalm 1xxxv. 10. In the mythological fable, the iron age became utterly corrupt when justice (Astraea) left the earth.-Ovid, Met. i. 150.

2 Compare Is. lii. 7, How beautiful upon the mountains, &c.

* See note 3, p. 3.

4 Used transitively.

5 Rev. xx. 2, 3.

The divination of oracles was supposed to have ceased at the coming of Christ.-See note 4, p. 149"Attention is irresistibly awakened and engaged by the air of solemnity and enthusiasm that reigns in this stanza and some that follow. to believe the superstitions real."-Jos. Warton

One is almost inclined

A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting Genius1 is with sighing sent;
With flower-inwoven tresses torn,

The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

In consecrated earth,

And on the holy hearth,

The Lars, and Lemures, moan with midnight plaint;
In urns, and altars round,

A drear and dying sound

Affrights the Flamens2 at their service quaint;
And the chill marble seems to sweat,3

While each peculiar Power foregoes his wonted seat.

Peor and Baalim⭑

Forsake their temples dim,

With that twice-batter'd god of Palestine;"
And mooned Ashtaroth,

Heaven's queen and mother both,

Now sits not girt with taper's holy shine;

The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn;"

In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz 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 king,

In dismal dance about the furnace blue:

The brutish gods of Nile as fast,

Isis, 10 and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.

1 For Genius, the tutelary daemon of a particular person or locality; and Lares, the Roman domestic deities, supposed to be the spirits of their ancestors, see Adam's Rom. Antiq. (Boyd), p. 230; for Lemures, Goblins, id. p. 415; for Nymphs, id. p. 233. See also Keightley's Mythology, pp. 206, 482.

Officiating priests.-See Adam's Rom. Antiq. (Boyd), p. 250.

The sweating of statues was one of the ancient prodigia.-See Virg. Georg. i. 480. From the Greek and Roman mythology he passes to that of the East. Baal-Peor, a Moabite deity, named from the mountain of his worship: some suppose him to be the same with Chemosh.-See Numb. xxv.: Psalm evi. 28: Par. Lost, i. 406, Baalim, the appellation of the male deities of Syria; Par. Lost, i. 422. Baal is Lord. 5 Dagon. Or Astarte, the Sidonian moon-deity. Judges x. 6:1 Kings xi. 5.: Jerem. xliv. 17-19. 7 Jupiter, worshipped in the Lybian oasis under the symbol of a ram. His oracle was very celebrated. Its reply to Alexander declaring him the son of Jupiter is well known; hence his effigies and those of his successors, the Egyptian Lagidae and the Syrian Seleucidae, wore horns as his father's emblem. "And his horned head belied the Lybian god. -Pope, Temple of Fame. The word Ammon gives its name to the horn-shaped fossil shell Ammonite. The horn was the symbol of power; hence the propriety of "shrinks his horn."

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8 Or Adonis. The annual festival of this idol in the Syrian cities was very licentious; part of it consisted in the lamentations of the women for his death.-See Ezek. viii. 14.— Par. Lost, i. 446-456.

9 Or Molech, Milcom, Malcham, the deity of the Ammonites: (the name implies King.) 1 Kings xi. 7.-Par. Lost, i. 392.

10 Isis was the sister and wife of Osiris; Orus was their son. Anubis was the conductor of souls to judgment; he was represented with the head of a jackal.

Nor is Osiris seen

In Memphian' grove or green,

Trampling the unshower'd 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 timbrell'd anthems dark

The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipt ark."

He feels from Judah's land

The dreaded infant's hand,

The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne;8
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 controls the damned crew.

L'ALLEGRO.6

Hence, loathed Melancholy,

Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born,

In Stygian cave forlorn,

'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy! Find out some uncouth cell,

Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,

And the night-raven sings;

There under ebon shades and low brow'd rocks,

As ragged as thy locks,

In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.

But come, thou goddess fair and free,

In heaven yclep'd Euphrosyne,"

And by men, heart-easing Mirth;
Whom lovely Venus, at a birth,

With two sister Graces10 more,

To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore:

*

Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,

Memphis, the ancient Lower Egyptian capital, in the neighbourhood of the pyramids. And stoled in white, those blazing wheels before,

* Compare Heber :

Osiris' ark his swarthy wizards bore.-Passage of the Red Sea.

a The old plural of eye. The brother and murderer of Osiris was worshipped in Egypt, symbolized in some places by a crocodile. Osiris is the good principle; Typhon the evil principle; corresponding to the Persian Ormuzd and Ahriman. Osiris and Isis are symbolized by the Sun and Moon. Milton, however, in the preceding stanza represents Osiris as a bull.

Allusion to the infant Hercules. This ode was one of Milton's college exercises, and written at the age of twenty-one. The Man of Mirth. Erebus, not Cerberus, was the legitimate husband of Night.-T. Warton. Milton makes his own parentage for his personification, Melancholy.

The Cimmerii, in Homer, a people of the west, dwelling in a county of cloud and gloom. Od. xi. 14. "Cimmerian darkness" was proverbial." Euphrosyne, (Gr.) Cheerfulness: one of the Graces. 10 Meat and Drink, the two sisters of Mirth-Warburton. These are somewhat strange Graces for Milton's admiration (see note 1, p. 187). The other classical sisters were Aglaia and Thalia.

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