Spenser, Shepherd’s Calendar, September.
Chaos. The earliest meaning of χάος in Greek, of ‘chaos’ in Latin, was empty infinite space, the yawning kingdom of darkness; only a secondary, that which we have now adopted, namely, the rude, confused, indigested, unorganized matter out of which the universe according to the heathen cosmogony was formed. But the primary use of ‘chaos’ was not strange to the scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Beside all these things, between us and you there is fixed a great chaos, that they which will pass from hence to you may not.—Luke xvi. 26. Rheims.
And look what other thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster’s mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goeth incontinently that foul great swallow of his.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. 975.
To the brow of heaven
Pursuing, drive them out from God and bliss
Into their place of punishment, the gulf
Of Tartarus, which ready opens wide
His fiery chaos to receive their fall.
Milton, Paradise Lost, vi. 51.