ry crime for a
knife, and Lady Macbeth shows her sense of this when she uses the word.
Again, the darkness that she invokes is not the solemn shadow of night,
but the stifling, opaque smoke of Hell. The blanket was perhaps suggested
to Shakespeare by the black canopy that hung over the Elizabethan stage
to represent night; but, in any case, it gives the notion of an
artificial privacy, shutting out light and shutting in sound, a smothered
unnatural secrecy. The use of the word _blanket_, in fact, carries with
it a new fantastic horror. Night herself, who has brought the fatal gift
of sleep to Duncan, is represented as the cowardly accomplice of the
murderers, performing the most dastardly office that can fall to the
hireling of a bravo.

The mean associations, therefore, in so far as they exist, help
Shakespeare's purpose. Milton had no purpose that could be furthered by
such help. The omissions in his descriptions cannot be supplied by an
appeal to experience, for what he describes is outside the pale of human
experience, and is, in that sense, unreal. His descriptions do not so
much remind us of what we have seen as create for us what we are to see.
He is bound, therefore, to avoid the slightest touch of unworthy
association; the use of even a few domestic figures and homely phrases
would bring his hanging palace about his ears. What dangers he escaped
may be well seen in Cowley's _Davideis_, which fell into them all. This
is how Cowley describes the attiring of his Gabriel, who is commissioned
to bear a message to David--

He took for skin a cloud most soft and bright,
That e'er the midday Sun pierced through with light:
Upon his cheeks a lively blush he spred;
Washt from the morning beauties deepest red.
An harmless flaming _Meteor_ shone for haire,
And fell adown his shoulders with loose care.
He cuts out a silk _Mantle_ from the skies,
Where the most sprightly azure pleas'd the eyes.
This he with starry vapours spangles all,
Took in their prime ere they grow _ripe_ and _fall_,--

--and so on. The whole business suggests the arming of Pigwiggin; or the
intricacies of Belinda's toilet in _The Rape of the Lock_. Such a Gabriel
should add the last touch of adornment from a patch-box filled with
sun-spots; and then is fit only to be--

Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep.

Milton was not in the least likely to fall into this fantastic-familiar
vein