When as at Chester once King Edgar held his court,
To whom eight lesser kings with homage did resort:
That mighty Mercian lord, him in his barge bestowed,
And was by all those kings about the river rowed.'
Aubrey, in his 'Miscellanies,' 1696, Chap. XVII., says, as quoted by Todd, 'F. Q.,' IV. xi. 39, 'when any Christian is drowned in the river Dee, there will appear over the water, where the corpse is, a light, by which means they do find the body; and it is therefore called the holy Dee.'
[58]. The Muse herself: Calliope.
[59]. enchanting: refers to the power he exercised, with the lyre given him by Apollo, over wild beasts, trees, rocks, etc.
[64-69]. Alas! what boots it: in these verses Milton, with his high ideal of the function of poetry, laments its low state, and momentarily gives way to the thought that it would be better to conform to the
prevailing flimsy taste than to 'strictly meditate the thankless Muse,' i.e. seriously devote one's self to song such as meets with no favor in these days. Amaryllis and Neæra are names of shepherdesses in Virgil's first and third Eclogues, and in other pastorals; 'meditate the thankless Muse' is after Virgil's 'Silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avenâ.'—Ecl., i. 2.
[75]. Fury: used in a general, and not in its special, mythological sense; the allusion is, of course, to Atropos, one of the Fates; called a blind fury by reason of the rashness with which she sometimes slits the thin-spun thread of life, as in the case of his friend King; 'slit' now always means to cut lengthwise; here, to cut across, sever.