[554.] Sleep (or Night) is represented as drawn by horses in a chariot with its curtains closely drawn. Comp. Macbeth, ii. l. 51, “curtained sleep.”
[555.] ‘The lady’s song rose into the air so sweetly and imperceptibly that silence was taken unawares and so charmed that she would gladly have renounced her nature and existence for ever if her place could always be filled by such music.’ Comp. Par. Lost, iv. 604, “She all night long her amorous descant sung; Silence was pleased”; also Jonson’s Vision of Delight:
“Yet let it like an odour rise
To all the senses here,
And fall like sleep upon their eyes,
Or music in their ear.”
[558.] took, taken. Comp. l. [256] for a similar use of take, and compare ‘forsook,’ line [499], for the form of the word.
[560.] Still, always. This use of still is frequent in Elizabethan writers (Abbott, § 69). I was all ear. Warton notes this expressive idiom (still current) in Drummond’s ‘Sonnet to the Nightingale,’ and in Tempest, iv. l. 59, “all eyes.” All is an attribute of I.
[561.] create a soul, etc., i.e. breathe life even into the dead: comp. L’Alleg. 144. Warton supposes that Milton may have seen a picture in an old edition of Quarles’ Emblems, in which “a soul in the figure of an infant is represented within the ribs of a skeleton, as in its prison.” Rom. vii. 24, “Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”
[565.] harrowed, distracted, torn as by a harrow. This is probably the meaning, but there is a verb ‘harrow’ corrupted from ‘harry,’ to subdue; hence some read “harried with grief and fear.”
[567.] How sweet ... how near. This sentence contains two exclamations: this is a Greek construction. In English the idiom is “How sweet ... and how near,” etc. We may, however, render the line thus: “How sweet..., how near the deadly snare is!”
[568.] lawns. ‘Lawn’ is always used by Milton to denote an open stretch of grassy ground, whereas in modern usage it is applied generally to a smooth piece of grass-grown land in front of a house. The origin of the word is disputed, but it seems radically to denote ‘a clear space’; it is said to be cognate with llan used as a prefix in the names of certain Welsh towns, e.g. Llandaff, Llangollen. In Chaucer it takes the form launde.
[569.] often trod by day, which I have often trod by day, and therefore know well.