For which the Shepherds, at their festivals, Carol her goodness loud in rustic lays, And throw sweet garland wreaths into her stream, 850

Of pansies, pinks, and gaudy daffadils. And, as the old Swain said, she can unlock

The clasping charm, and thaw the numbing spell,

If she be right invoked in warbled song; For maidenhood she loves, and will be swift

To aid a virgin, such as was herself,
In hard-besetting need. This will I try,
And add the power of some adjuring verse.

Listen, and appear to us,

In name of great Oceanus,

By the earth-shaking Neptune's mace,
And Tethys' grave majestic pace;
By hoary Nereus' wrinkled look,
And the Carpathian wizard's hook;
By scaly Triton's winding shell,
And old soothsaying Glaucus' spell;
By Leucothea's lovely hands,
And her son that rules the strands;
By Thetis' tinsel-slippered feet,
And the songs of Sirens sweet;
By dead Parthenope's dear tomb,
And fair Ligea's golden comb,
Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks
Sleeking her soft alluring locks;
By all the nymphs that nightly dance
Upon thy streams with wily glance;
Rise, rise, and heave thy rosy head
From thy coral-paven bed,

870

880

Spir. Goddess dear,
We implore thy powerful hand
To undo the charmed band

Of true virgin here distressed

Through the force and through the wile Of unblessed enchanter vile.

Sabr. Shepherd, 't is my office best To help insnared Chastity. Brightest Lady, look on me. Thus I sprinkle on thy breast Drops that from my fountain pure I have kept of pretious cure; Thrice upon thy finger's tip, Thrice upon thy rubied lip: Next this marble venomed seat,

Smeared with gums of glutinous heat,

I touch with chaste palms moist and cold.

Now the spell hath lost his hold;

And I must haste ere morning hour
To wait in Amphitrite's bower.

920

I

Lycidas is an elegy, and as such offers no peculiar difficulties of interpretation for a modern reader; but it is also a pastoral elegy, and belongs therefore to a type of literature which has fallen so completely into disuse that an act of the historic imagination is required to place us in the proper attitude toward it. Unless we understand something of the theory underlying the pastoral poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and something of the mental conditions lying behind that theory, we can with difficulty do justice to a poem like Lycidas, which moves in a world of deliberate artifice, where the restrictions and the liberties are alike fantastic. Dr. Johnson's amusingly jejune animadversions upon Lycidas represent in its extremest form the danger of judging such a poem by standards of mere

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99 common-sense." The letter of such criticism as his is often true, but the spirit is grotesquely false, because it leaves out of account both the general differences which mark off poetry from prose, and, still more flagrantly, the particular mould into which the pastoral poets deliberately chose to cast their thoughts.

The rise and progress of pastoral poetry on the Continent and in England forms one of the most curious chapters in the history of literature. From Portugal, where it took its rise in the fourteenth century, it spread rapidly through the whole of civilized Europe, and persisted in various forms until late in the eighteenth century. It enlisted the pens of the greatest writers, -Cervantes in Spain, Tasso and Boccaccio in Italy, Spenser, Fletcher, and Milton in England. It invaded the drama; it found its way into politics, and into religion. In France it produced at least one great

painter, Watteau, and built up a system of manners and sentiments which not even the subtle laughter of Molière could overthrow, The mock village where Marie Antoinette and the ladies of her court played at being shepherdesses and milkmaids still stands in the park of the Petit Trianon at Versailles; and the royal toy, with its pathetic associations, reminds us how persistent was the enthusiasm for the pastoral idea, and in what curious ramifications the enthusiasm worked itself out. No movement of mind ever takes place on such a scale as this unless it springs from deep causes; the art products which accompany it, however artificial and perverse they may seem on the surface, minister to real spiritual needs of the age wherein they appear.

The source of the pastoral poetry and romance of the Renaissance is to be found, naturally, in the country idylls of the Sicilian poets, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, and in the Bucolics of Virgil. Even the earliest and simplest of the Sicilian idylls have a note of artificiality, in that they are studies of country life from the outside, by minds more or less artistically sophisticated. Virgil, essentially an urban poet, though with a keen sensibility to the idyllic aspects of country life, took still more plainly this outside point of view, — a view exactly opposite (to choose a modern instance) from that which Wordsworth constantly tried to assume. This primary bent away from realism received, when the pastoral forms of poetry began to be received in southern Europe, a great reinforcement from the nature of the Renaissance itself. The life of the Renaissance was an urban life; beyond the circumvallations of defense within which the great revival ran its course still lay the shadow of medievalism. Any real sympathy with the life of the woods and fields on the part of a man of the town was

impossible. Still, just there beyond the walls the country lay, and for the seeing eye of the artist could not but have an irresistible appeal. Being chiefly external and visual, this appeal naturally came first to the painters and worked itself out in those conventionalized but still lovely backgrounds of hill and river which the early artists put behind their madonnas. The poets were not slow to take the hint, and to provide a country setting for their fancies. But they came to nature with their minds full of classical images. They saw nature only across a vague mist of literary recollection. They peopled their landscapes with nymphs and goddesses, satyrs and fauns, because the poets they revered had done so. The whole topography, fauna, and flora of the country where the poet lived suffered a change into something remembered from Latin or Greek poetry.

This

In the midst of this fantastic landscape, with its mythological accessories, they set, not real country - folk, of whose characters and modes of mind an understanding was denied to them, but men and women of their acquaintance, disguised in bucolic costume, and following, in the intervals of love-making and song-piping, the mildest of bucolic pursuits. The result of all this was a type of literature perhaps more completely separated from fact than any other that has ever existed under the sun. unreality, however, so far from lessening the hold of pastoral literature on men's minds, proved to be the chief element of its charm. Men welcomed with eagerness this odd, remote world of the pastoral, where existence smoothed itself out into languid summer sweetness, where time and its tragedies were a tale told in the shade, and where no fact intervened to break with harsh angle the soft sky line of fancy. The pastoral ministered to the longing for evasion, for an escape from the tyranny of the actual, which is a constant element in the human imagination. It was at the same time a facile genre to cultivate. It

appealed to the finest talents by reason of its ideality, as strongly as it attracted mediocre wits by the easy successes which it offered.

When the pastoral went over into England, in the wake of the Italianizing school headed by Spenser and Sidney, two changes took place in it. It gained in spontaneity of nature-feeling, chiefly in the hands of Spenser and William Browne, and it gained in moral earnestness, especially in the work of George Wither and Phineas Fletcher. The pastoral form came to Milton's hands, therefore, with all its original quaint remoteness and fantastic ideality unimpaired, but with a new freshness of feeling added to it, and the proved possibility that its pretty fictions could be used to convey a serious message.

II

In the late summer of 1637 news came to Milton of the drowning of Edward King off the Welsh coast; and after the opening of the fall term at Cambridge, he was asked to contribute to a memorial volume of verse to be dedicated to King's memory. When he began to cast about for a form in which to put his thought, several considerations urged him toward the pastoral elegy. Because its classical origin and prototypes, that form had a traditional academic flavor appropriate to the circumstances. The pastoral fiction had moreover been used by two generations of English poets as a vehicle for affectionate communication with each other in verse; and King, though not a gifted singer, had at least justified his shepherdship by frequent versemaking. These, however, were minor considerations. Of much more moment in determining Milton's choice must have been his perception of the double fact that his real interest in King and his fate was a symbolic rather than a personal one, and that the pastoral was of all forms of poetry the most amenable to symbolic treatment.