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Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son; If answerable style I can obtain Of my celestial patroness, who deigns Her nightly visitation unimplored, And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires Easy my unpremeditated verse, Since first this subject for heroic song Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late, Not sedulous by nature to indite Wars, hitherto the only argument Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect, With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights, In battles feigned—the better fortitude Of patience and heroic martyrdom Unsung-or to describe races and games, Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields, Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds, Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights At joust and tournament, then marshalled feast Served up in hall with sewers and seneschals, The skill of artifice or office mean, Not that which justly gives heroic name To person or to poem. Me, of these Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument Remains; sufficient of itself to raise That name, unless an age too late, or cold Climate, or years, damp my intended wing Depressed; and much they may if all be mine, Not hers, who brings it nightly to my ear.2 The sun was sunk, and after him the star Of Hesperus, whose office is to bring Twilight upon the earth, short arbiter

'Twixt day and night; and now, from end to end, ¹ Cytherea.—One of the names of Venus.

PARADISE LOST.

BOOK IX.-52-84]

Night's hemisphere had veiled the horizon round, When Satan, who late fled before the threats Of Gabriel out of Eden, now improved In meditated fraud and malice, bent On Man's destruction, maugre what might hap Of heavier on himself, fearless returned, By night he fled, and at midnight returned From compassing the earth; cautious of day, Since Uriel, regent of the sun, descried His entrance, and forewarned the cherubim That kept their watch. Thence, full of anguish, driven, The space of seven continued nights he rode With darkness: thrice the equinoctial line He circled, four times croseed the car of Night From pole to pole, traversing each colure;1 On the eighth returned, and, on the coast averse From entrance or cherubic watch, by stealth Found unsuspected way. There was a place, Now not, though sin, not time, first wrought the change, Where Tigris, at the foot of Paradise, Into a gulf shot under ground, till part Rose up a fountain by the tree of life; In with the river sunk, and with it rose, Satan, involved in rising mist, then sought Where to lie hid. Sea he had searched, and land From Eden over Pontus, and the pool Mæotis, up beyond the river Ob; Downward as far antarctic; and, in length, West from Orontes to the ocean barred At Darien, thence to the land where flows Ganges and Indus. Thus the orb he roamed With narrow search, and, with inspection deep, Considered every creature, which of all

^\ Nightly to my ear.—These personal episodes have been censured by critics as displaced in such a poem, and schaps not without reason. But as they come for the names of Venus. perhaps not without reason. But as they come from Milton, the reader, we doubt not, will give them a cordial and

^\ Each colure.—The colures are two great circles intersecting each other at right angles in the poles, and encompassing the earth from north to south, and from south to north again, so that to traverse these was to traverse the