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Potable gold, when with one virtuous touch The arch-chymic sun, so far from us remote, Produces, with terrestial humour mixed, Here in the dark so many precious things Of colour glorious, and effect so rare? Here matter new to gaze the Devil met Undazzled. Far and wide his eye commands; For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade, But all sunshine, as when his beams at noon Culminate from the equator, as they now Shot upward still direct, whence no way round Shadow from body opaque can fall; and the air, Nowhere so clear, sharpened his visual ray To objects distant far, whereby he soon Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand, The same whom John saw also in the sun. His back was turned, but not his brightness hid; Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar Circled his head, nor less his locks behind Illustrious on his shoulders, fledge with wings, Lay waving round. On some great charge employed He seemed, or fixed in cogitation deep.

Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hope

To find who might direct his wandering flight

To Paradise, the happy seat of Man,

His journey's end, and our beginning woe.

But first he casts¹ to change his proper shape,

Which else might work him danger or delay.

And now a stripling cherub he appears,

Not of the prime, yet such as in his face

Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb

Suitable grace diffused, so well he feigned.

Under a coronet his flowing hair

In curls on either cheek played; wings he wore,

1 He casts. - Considers - forecasts.

By centre or eccentric, hard to tell,

Or longitude,—where the great luminary

Aloof the vulgar constellations thick,

That from his lordly eye keep distance due,

Dispenses light from far: they, as they move

Their starry dance in numbers that compute

Days, months, and years, towards his all-cheering lamp

Turn swift their various motions, or are turned

By his magnetic beam, that gently warms

The universe, and to each inward part

With gentle penetration, though unseen,

Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep;

So wondrously was set his station bright.

There lands the Fiend, a spot like which perhaps Astronomer in the sun's lucent orb Through his glazed optic tube yet never saw. The place he found beyond expression bright, Compared with aught on earth, metal or stone; Not all parts like, but all alike informed With radiant light, as glowing iron with fire; If metal, part seemed gold, part silver clear: If stone, carbuncle most or chrysolite, Ruby or topaz, or the twelve that shone In Aaron's breastplate, and a stone besides Imagined rather oft than elsewhere seen, That stone, or like to that, which here below Philosophers in vain so long have sought, In vain, though by their powerful art they bind Volatile Hermes,1 and call up unbound In various shapes old Proteus² from the sea, Drained through a limbec to his native form. What wonder then if fields and regions here Breathe forth elixir pure, and rivers run

^\Volatile Hermes.—i.e., can make mercury or quicksilver do their will.

\\*Old Proteus.—A person who baffles his pursuers by assuming all shapes, but who is said to have been fixed in his true shape at last. So chemistry passes through changing phenomena to fixedness and certainty.