from it the thought of hanging the world by a golden chain. -NEWTON. 67 Ver. 1013. Springs upward, like a pyramid of fire. To take in the full meaning of this magnificent similitude, we must imagine ourselves in Chaos, and a vast luminous body rising upward near the place where we are, so swiftly as to appear a continued track of light, and lessening to the view according to the increase of distance, till it end in a point, and then disappear; and all this must be supposed to strike our eye at one instant.-BEATTIE. Ibid. In Satan's voyage through Chaos there are several imaginary persons described, as residing in that immense waste of matter. This may perhaps be conformable to the taste of those critics who are pleased with nothing in a poet which has not life and manners ascribed to it; but, for my own part, I am pleased most with those passages in this description which carry in them a greater measure of probability, and are such as might possibly have happened of this kind is his first mounting in the smoke that rises from the infernal pit; his falling into a cloud of nitre and the like combustible materials, that by their explosion still hurried him forward in his voyage; his springing upward like a pyramid of fire; with his laborious passage through that confusion of elements, which the poet calls The womb of nature, and perhaps her grave. The glimmering light which shot into the Chaos from the utmost verge of the creation, and the distant discovery of the earth, that hung close by the moon, are wonderfully beautiful and poetical.—ADDISON. 68 Ver. 1028. Tamely endured a bridge. Dr. Newton here agrees with Dr. Bentley in censuring this introduction of the infernal bridge, because it is described in the tenth book, for several lines together, as a thing untouched before, and an incident to surprise the reader; and therefore the poet should not have anticipated it here. Milton is said to have apparently copied this bridge, not as Dr. Warton has conjectured, from the Persian poet Sadi, but from the Arabian fiction of the bridge, called in Arabic Al Sirat, which is represented to extend over the infernal gulf, and to be narrower than a spider's web, and sharper than the edge of a sword.-Pocock in Port. Mos. p. 282. See Annotations on Hist. of Caliph Vathek, 1786, p. 314.Todd. 69 Ver. 1042. By dubious light. In this line, and in the preceding description of the "glimmering dawn" that Satan first meets with, Milton very probably alludes to Seneca's elegant account of Hercules's passage out of hell, Herc. Fur. 668 : Non cæca tenebris incipit prima via : Tenuis relictæ lucis a tergo nitor, Fulgorque dubius solis afflicti cadit.-THYER. 70 Ver. 1052. This pendent world, in bigness as a star. By this pendent world is not meant the earth, but the new creation, heaven and earth, the whole orb of fixed stars immensely bigger than the earth, a mere point in the comparison. This is certain from what Chaos had lately said, v. 1004: Now lately heaven and earth, another world, Hung o'er my realm, link'd in a golden chain. Besides, Satan did not see the earth yet; he was afterwards surprised "at the sudden view of all this world at once," b. iii. 542. and wandered long on the outside of it, till at last he saw our sun, and learned there of the archangel Uriel, where the earth and paradise were. See b. iii. 722. This pendent world, therefore, must mean the whole worldthe new-created universe; and, "beheld far off," it appeared, in comparison with the empyreal heaven, no bigger 128 NOTES ON PARADISE LOST. BOOK II. than "a star of smallest magnitude," nay, not so large; it appeared no bigger than such a star appears to be when it is "close by the moon," the superior light whereof makes any star that happens to be near her disk, to seem exceedingly small, and almost disappear.-NEWTON. ADDITIONAL NOTE. Although the text has not been altered, the following discovery merits to be laid before the accurate readers of Milton. Ver. 855. Fearless to be o'ermatch'd by living might. Living might would not except even God himself, the Ever-living and the Almighty. The author therefore gave it, "by living wight:" as in this same book, ver. 613:"All taste of living wight." This expression is established and consecrated by our Chaucer and Spenser.— BENTLEY. In confirmation of the doctor's happy conjecture, "living wight" is the reading of Simmons's third edition, 1678, and was probably a correction dictated by Milton, after the second edition was printed. This Dr. Bentley was not aware of. See Ed. 1678, p. 53. |