THE NATIVITY.

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 water kissed,

Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,

Who now hath quite forgot to rave,

While birds of calm1 sit brooding on the charméd wave.

The stars with deep amaze
Stand fixed in stedfast gaze,

Bending one way their precious influence;
And will not take their flight

For all the morning light,

Or Lucifer, that often warned them thence;
But in their glimmering orbs did glow
Until their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go.

And though the shady gloom

Had given day her room,

The sun himself withheld his wonted speed,

And hid his head for shame,

As his inferior flame

The new enlightened world no more should need :

He saw a greater sun appear

Than his bright throne or burning axle-tree could bear.

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.

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silent.

ere ever.

then.

1 The birds called halcyons were said to build their nests on the water, and, while they were brooding, to keep it calm.

2 The morning star.

3 The God of shepherds especially, but the God of all nature-the All in all, for Pan means the All.

When such music sweet

Their hearts and ears did greet
As never was by mortal finger strook-
Divinely warbled voice

Answering the stringéd noise,

As all their souls in blissful rapture took :
The air, such pleasure loath to lose,
With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close.
Nature, that heard such sound,

Beneath the hollow round

Of Cynthia's seat1 the airy region thrilling,
Now was almost won

To think her part was done,

And that her reign had here its last fulfilling:

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 shame-faced night arrayed;
The helméd cherubim

And sworded seraphim

Are seen in glittering ranks with wings displayed,
Harping in loud and solemn choir,

With unexpressive 2 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,

While the Creator great

His constellations set,

And the well-balanced world on hinges hung,3

And cast the dark foundations deep,

And bid the weltering waves their oozy channel keep.

1 Milton here uses the old Ptolemaic theory of a succession of solid crystal concentric spheres, in which the heavenly bodies were fixed, and which revolving carried these with them. The lowest or innermost of these spheres was that of the moon. "The hollow round of Cynthia's seat" is, therefore, this sphere in which the moon sits.

2 That cannot be expressed or described.

By hinges he means the axis of the earth, on which it turns as on a hinge. The origin of hinge is hang. It is what anything hangs on.

THE NATIVITY.

Ring out, ye crystal spheres ;
Once bless our human ears-

If ye have power to touch our senses so;1
And let your silver chime

Move in melodious time;

And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow;
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,

Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,

Throned in celestial sheen,

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This is an apostrophe to the nine spheres (see former note), which were believed by the ancients to send forth in their revolutions a grand harmony, too loud for mortals to hear. But no music of the lower region can make up full harmony without the bass of heaven's organ. The music of the spheres was to Milton the embodiment of the theory of the universe. He uses the symbol often.

2 Consort is the right word scientifically. It means the fitting together of sounds according to their nature. Concert, however, is not wrong. It is even more poetic than consort, for it means a striving together, which is the idea of all peace: the strife is together, and not of one against the other. All harmony is an ordered, a divine strife. In the contest of music, every tone restrains its foot and bows its head to the rest in holy dance.

Symphony is here used for chorus, and quite correctly; for symphony is a voicing together. To this symphony of the angels the spheres and the heavenly organ are the accompaniment.

• Die of the music.

With radiant feet 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 babe lies yet in smiling infancy,
That on the bitter cross

Must redeem our loss,

So both himself and us to glorify.

Yet first, to those y-chained 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 agéd earth, aghast

With terror of that blast,

Shall from the surface to the centre shake,

When, at the world's last sessiön,

The dreadful 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,
Swinges1 the scaly horror of his folded tail.

The oracles are dumb: 3

No voice or hideous hum

Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving;

1 Not merely swings, but lashes about.

2 Full of folds or coils.

The legend concerning this cessation of the oracles associates it with the Crucifixion. Milton in The Nativity represents it as the consequence of the very presence of the infant Saviour. War and lying are banished together.

THE NATIVITY.

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-eyed priest from the prophetic cell.

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

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

Edged with poplar pale,

The parting genius 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 2 moan with midnight plaint;

In urns and altars round,

A drear and dying sound

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

While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.

Peor and Baälim

Forsake their temples dim,

With that twice-battered god of Palestine ;

And moonéd Ashtaroth,

Heaven's queen and mother both,

Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine;

The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn ; 4

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the Assyrian Venus.

In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz 5 mourn.

1 The genius is the local god, the god of the place as a place.

2 The Lars were the protecting spirits of the ancestors of the family; the Lemures were evil spirits, spectres, or bad ghosts. But the notions were somewhat indefinite.

3 Flamen was the word used for priest when the Romans spoke of the priest of any particular divinity. Hence the peculiar power in the last line of the stanza.

4 Jupiter Ammon, worshipped in Libya, in the north of Africa, under the form of a goat. "He draws in his horn."

"The Syrian Adonis.