e
from our early style to the modern brought with it at first a loss of
nature and simplicity is undeniable; yet the bolder and wider scope
which Poetry took between 1620 and 1700, and the successful efforts
then made to gain greater clearness in expression, in their results
have been no slight compensation.

PAGE NO.

58 85 l. 8 _whist_: hushed.

-- -- l. 32 _than_: obsolete for _then_: _Pan_: used here for the Lord
of all.

59 -- l. 38 _consort_: Milton's spelling of this word, here and
elsewhere, has been followed, as it is uncertain whether he used it in
the sense of _accompanying_, or simply for _concert_.

61 -- l. 21 _Lars and Lemures_: household gods and spirits of
relations dead. _Flamens_ (l. 24) Roman priests. _That twice-batter'd
god_ (l. 29) Dagon.

62 -- l. 6 _Osiris_, the Egyptian god of Agriculture (here, perhaps by
confusion with Apis, figured as a Bull), was torn to pieces by Typho and
embalmed after death in a sacred chest. This mythe, reproduced in Syria
and Greece in the legends of Thammuz, Adonis, and perhaps Absyrtus, may
have originally signified the annual death of the Sun or the Year under
the influences of the winter darkness. Horus, the son of Osiris, as the
New Year, in his turn overcomes Typho. L. 8 _unshower'd_ grass: as watered
by the Nile only. L. 33 _youngest-teemed_: last-born. _Bright-harness'd_
(l. 37) armoured.

64 87 _The Late Massacre_: the Vaudois persecution, carried on in 1655
by the Duke of Savoy. No more mighty Sonnet than this 'collect in
verse,' as it has been justly named, probably can be found in any
language. Readers should observe that it is constructed on the
original Italian or Provencal model. This form, in a language such as
ours, not affluent in rhyme, presents great difficulties; the rhymes
are apt to be forced, or the substance commonplace. But, when
successfully handled, it has a unity and a beauty of effect which
place the strict Sonnet above the less compact and less lyrical
systems adopted by Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, and other Elizabethan
poets.

65 88 Cromwell returned from Ireland in 1650, and Marvell probably
wrote his lines soon after, whilst living at Nunappleton in the
Fairfax household. It is hence not surprising that (st. 21-24) he
should have been deceived by Cromwell's professed submissiveness to
the Parliament which, when it declined to register his decrees, he
expelled by armed violence:--one despotism, by natural law, replacing