To seek a stable to his horse;
The moss was open, and Tam fell in,
"I've stabled mysel'," quo' Tam o' the linn.
[138]. "Sabrina."
This song is from "Comus," a masque written by Milton for the entertainment of the Earl of Bridgewater, lord lieutenant of Wales, at Ludlow Castle in 1634. That Castle's Hall is now open to the sky—"the lightning shines there; snow burdens the ivy." From a neighbouring room the two princes, Edward V. and his brother, went to their dark death in the Tower. Below the ruinous Castle flow together the Terne and the Corve, on their way to the great Severn—of which Sabrina, the daughter of Estrildis, is the Nymph, she having been drowned in its waters by Guendolen, the jealous queen of Locrine the son of Brut. Estrildis herself, the daughter of King Humber, "so farre excelled in bewtie, that none was then lightly found unto her comparable, for her skin was so whyte that scarcely the fynest kind of Ivorie that might be found, nor the snowe lately fallen downe from the Elament, nor the Lylles did passe the same."
Milton's poems—Lycidas, for instance—frequently resemble bunches of keys, each one of them fitting the lock of some ancient myth or legend. In the lines I have omitted from No. 138 are many such locks awaiting the reader—a reference to the following tale of Glaucus, for example:
There is a secret herb which, if nibbled by fish already gasping to death in our air, gives them the power and cunning to slip back through the grasses into their waters again. Of this herb Glaucus tasted, and instantly his eyes dazzled in desire to share their green transparent deeps. Whereupon the laughing divinities of the rivers gave him sea-green hair, sleeking the stream, fins and a fish's tail, and feasted him merrily. His story is told by Keats in the third book of his Endymion, while Leucothea's, another reference, is to be found in the fifth of the Odyssey. As for the Sirens, here is the counsel Circe gave Ulysses, the while his seamen lay asleep the night after they had returned in safety from Pluto's dismal mansions:
"... And then observe: They sit amidst a mead,
And round about it runs a hedge or wall
Of dead men's bones, their withered skins and all