o was an appreciative reader of Shakespeare. The lines
themselves give no hint of great poetic genius; they are a fair specimen
of the conventional, labored eulogy in vogue at the time.

4. star-ypointing. To make the decasyllabic verse, the poet takes the
liberty of prefixing to the present participle the _y_ which properly
belongs only to the past.

8. a livelong monument. Instead of _livelong_, the first issue of the
lines, in the Shakespeare folio of 1632, has _lasting_. The change is
Milton's, appearing in his revision of his poems in 1645. Does it seem to
be an improvement?

10-12. and that each heart hath ... took. The conjunction _that_ simply
repeats the _whilst_.

11. thy unvalued book. In Hamlet I 3 19 _unvalued persons_ are persons of
no value, or of no rank. In Macbeth III 1 94 the _valued file_ is the
file that determines values or ranks. In Milton's phrase the _unvalued
book_ means the book whose merit is so great as to be beyond all
valuation: a new rank must be created for it.

12. Those Delphic lines: lines so crowded with meaning as to seem the
utterances of an oracle.

13. our fancy of itself bereaving: transporting us into an ecstasy, or
making us rapt with thought.

14. Dost make _us_ marble with too much conceiving. The concentrated
attention required to penetrate Shakespeare's meaning makes statues of
us.

15. Make the word sepulchred fit metrically into the iambic verse.

L'ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO.

The year in which the poems were composed is uncertain. Masson regards
1632 as the probable date.

The exquisite poems to which Milton gave the Italian titles
L'Allegro,--the mirthful, or jovial, man,--and Il Penseroso,--the
melancholy, or saturnine, man,--should be regarded each as the pendant
and complement of the other, and should be read as a single whole. The
poet knew both moods, and takes both standpoints with equal grace and
heartiness. The essential idea of thus contrasting the mirthful and the
melancholy temperament he found ready to his hand. Robert Burton had
prefaced his _Anatomy of Melancholy_, published in 1621, with a series of
not unpleasing, though by no means graceful, amoebean stanzas, in which
two speakers alternately represent Melancholy, one as sweet and divine,
and the other as harsh, sour, and damned. Undoubtedly Milton knew his
Burton. But if he got his main idea from this source, he made his poems
thoroughly Miltonic by his ar