arisons from ancient
history and mythology, or from those great and strange things in Nature
which repel intimacy--the sun, the moon, the sea, planets in opposition,
a shooting star, an evening mist, a will-o'-the-wisp, a vulture
descending from the Himalayas, the ice-floes on the North-East passage,
the sea-beast leviathan, Xerxes' Hellespontic bridge, the gryphon
pursuing the Arimaspian, the madness of Alcides in Oeta, the rape of
Proserpine, and a hundred more reminiscences of the ancient world.

Even the great events of ancient history seemed to him at times too
familiar, too little elevated and remote to furnish a resting-place for a
song that intended "no middle flight." He transforms his proper names,
both to make them more melodious, and to make them more unfamiliar to the
ear. No praise is too high for his art and skill in this matter. An
example may be found in those four lines--the earliest that have the full
Miltonic resonance--describing the fate of Lycidas, carried by the tide
southward to the Cornish coast:--

Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great Vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold.

"Bellerus" seems to be a name of Milton's coinage. He had written
"Corineus," and probably disliked the sound, for in this case it can
hardly have been that the name was too familiar. Both reasons concurred
in prompting the allusion to Pharaoh and his Egyptian squadrons as--

Busiris and his Memphian chivalry.

One would think "Italy" a pleasant enough sound, and "Vulcan" a good
enough name for poetry. Neither was musical enough for Milton; both
perhaps had associations too numerous, familiar, and misleading. Vulcan
is mentioned, by that name, in _Comus_; but in _Paradise Lost_, where the
story of his fall from Heaven is told, and the architect of Pandemonium
is identified with him, both names, "Italy" and "Vulcan," are heightened
and improved:--

In Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber.

"Hephaistos," the name dear to moderns, could have found no place in
Milton's works, unless it had been put in a description of the God's
smithy, or, perhaps, in the sonnet where are pilloried those
harsh-sounding Presbyterian names:--

Collkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp.

Milton's use of proper names is a measure of his poetic genius. He does
not forego it even in the lyric. Was there ever so learned a ly