[784.] nor ... nor. These correlatives are often used in poetry for neither ... nor (Shakespeare often omitting the former altogether), and are equally correct. Nor is only a contraction of neither, and the first may as well be contracted as the second.
[785.] sublime notion and high mystery. In the Apology for Smectymnuus Milton tells of his study of the “divine volume of Plato,” wherein he learned of the “abstracted sublimities” of Chastity and Love: also of his study of the Holy Scripture “unfolding these chaste and high mysteries, with timeless care infused, that the body is for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.”
[790.] dear wit. ‘Dear’ is here used in contempt: its original sense is ‘precious’ (A.S. deore), but in Elizabethan English it has a variety of meanings, e.g. intense, serious, grievous, great, etc. Comp. “sad occasion dear,” Lyc. 6; “dear groans,” L. L. L. v. 2. 874. Craik suggests “that the notion properly involved in it of love, having first become generalised into that of a strong affection of any kind, had thence passed on to that of such an emotion the very reverse of love,” as in my dearest foe. gay rhetoric: here so named in contempt, as being the instrument of sophistry.
[791.] fence, argumentation, Fence is an abbreviation of defence: comp. “tongue-fence” (Milton), “fencer in wits’ school” (Fuller), Much Ado, v. 1. 75.
[794.] rapt spirits. ‘Rapt’ = enraptured, as if the mind or soul had been carried out of itself (Lat. raptus, seized): comp. Il Pens. 40, “Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.” Milton also uses the word of the actual snatching away of a person: “What accident hath rapt him from us,” Par. Lost, ii. 40.
[797.] the brute Earth, etc., i.e. the senseless Earth would become sensible and assist me. ‘Brute’ = Lat. brutus, dull, insensible: comp. Horace, Odes, i. 34. 9, “bruta tellus.”
[800.] She fables not: she speaks truly. This line is alliterative.
[801.] set off: comp. Lyc. 80, “set off to the world.”
[802.] though not mortal: sc. ‘I am.’ shuddering dew. The epithet is, by hypallage, transferred from the person to the dew or cold sweat which ‘dips’ or moistens his body.
[804.] Speaks thunder and the chains of Erebus, etc.; in allusion to the Titanomachia or contest between Zeus and the Titans. Zeus, having been provided with thunder and lightning by the Cyclops, cast the Titans into Tartarus or Erebus, a region as far below Hell as Heaven is above the Earth. The leader of the Titans was Cronos (Saturn). There is a zeugma in speaks as applied to ‘thunder’ and ‘chains,’ unless it be taken as in both cases equivalent to denounces.