"the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven's wide pathless way."
Perhaps no one again, till Shelley came, felt the vastness, the pathlessness, of the heaven as Milton did. Or, to come to earth again, where does poetry set the ear more instantly and actively at the work of imaginative {112} creation than in those finely suggestive lines about the curfew—
"Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar"?
And what of that woodland solitude at noon, with memories in it of so many poets of Greece, Rome, Italy and England, the
"shadows brown, that Sylvan loves,
Of pine, or monumental oak,
Where the rude axe with heavèd stroke
Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt
Or fright them from their hallowed haunt,"
which carries us on to perhaps the loveliest lines in all the Paradise Lost—
"In shadier bower,
More sacred and sequestered, though but feigned,
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
Nor Faunus haunted."
There is in the two passages just the difference between the youth and maturity of genius; but that is all. So Il Penseroso passes on its delightful way, ending, of course, in music and heaven.
There, too, "before the starry threshold of Jove's court," the next of these earlier works of Milton, the mask Comus, begins. {113} It strikes its high note at once in what an old lover of literature boldly called "the finest opening of any theatrical piece ancient or modern."
"Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes
Of bright aerial spirits live insphered
In regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call Earth, and, with low-thoughted care,
Confined and pestered in this pinfold here,
Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being,
Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives,
After this mortal change, to her true servants
Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats."