Now heaps upon some face with vast excess,
Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed
In unsuperfluous even proportion,
And she no whit encumbered with her store.
That strain continues until the guilty wizard stands abashed, like Satan before the immaculate angel of the covenant, feeling how awful virtue is: Comus confesses his fears of self-condemnation. He felt “her words set off by some superior power,” and in spite of his professed exemption from mortal ills, acknowledges “a cold shuddering dew dips me all o’er.” Still he resolves to dissemble, and as he is proceeding with his speech, in rush the brothers of the lady to the rescue, and scatter all things around them.
The attendant Spirit again appears on the stage, to exercise her guardian offices, and speaks at length. All the speakers are imbued with classical knowledge, and abound in classical allusions. This is just Miltonic. They are learned in Latin and Greek. And why should Milton consult the verisimilitudes of the stage? In the compass of thirteen lines of a song by the attendant Spirit, there are several classical or fabulous names, among them Neptune, Nereus, Triton, Glaucus, Thetis, Parthenope. How finely does he interweave them with the thread of his song, even, by his poetic art, imparting to them a portion of the melody that is vocal in his verse. He seems capable of setting to music the whole catalogue of the Pantheon, the Stoa, the Academy, and the Temples, whose sublime and impressive architecture itself suggests an analogy to poetry of a high order. Then the Nereids, the Dryads, the Fauns will always be poetical in an humbler sense, so long as the woods and the waters shall be grateful to the senses or pleasing to the imagination. Even the horrid Satyrs are welcomed among his guests.
This poem is full of MUSIC, reminding us as well of the beautiful bond—the indissoluble vinculum—that unites the sister arts, as of the author’s passion for the science and the symphonies of sweet sounds. A good recitation of his Ode on the Nativity is equal to a grand overture on the organ. He was an Epic all over. To quote from this very Comus, he could originate “strains that might create a soul under the ribs of death.” If he did not absolutely invent the exquisite epithet “rosy bosomed hours,” (it being derived from the Rododatetylos Eos, “rosy-fingered Aurora” of Homer,) he interwove it most gracefully in his song, as he did all thoughts, images, and words which he deemed worthy of adaptation into the magic structure of his works. They were so many living, many-colored stones in that glorious temple of poesy, (be it reverentially spoken,) “not made with hands,” but elaborated and elevated to its towering height by those marvelous intellectual powers which are as much the gift of God as inspiration itself, and far more identified with the MAN than inspiration possibly could be. Oh, how solemn the spectacle, to contemplate such a genius with his eye fixed, like that of an ancient prophet, in a vision of spiritual worlds, peopled, not with the ordinary phantoms of an earthly imagination, but with beings of immortal mould and unmeasured power; his ear open to catch the “ninefold harmony” of the celestial orders, as they sing and praise the glorious Creator; his march above the ordinary walks of humanity; his very soul taking wings, and like the eagle soaring “with no middle flight,” but passing “the flaming bounds of time and space,” and ascending from sphere to sphere until he reaches the throne of the Eternal, there to hold high communion with the Invisible God, and the august and awful associations that surround him, whom “No eye hath seen nor can see, to whom be honor and power everlasting.”
THE GRAVE’S PALE ROSES.
———