natural state, comes to signify metallic lustre generally. See Comus
719, 933.

173. See Matthew XIV 25.

175. Compare Comus 838.

176. the unexpressive nuptial song. See Hymn on the Nativity 116. See
also Revelation XIX 7-9.

181. And wipe the tears forever from his eyes. See Revelation XXI 4.

183. Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore. This is the same
promotion that was accorded to Melicertes, son of Ino, who on his death
became the genius of the shore under the name of Palaemon.

186. uncouth; a self-depreciating expression meaning _unknown_ or
_obscure_.

187. Milton applies the epithet gray both to evening and to morning.

188. various quills are the tubes of the shepherd pipe.

189. Doric means simply _pastoral_, because the idylls of the first
pastoral poets were written in the Doric dialect of Greek.

190. had stretched out all the hills: had caused the shadows of the hills
to prolong themselves eastward on the plain.

The poet seems to feign that he spent a day in the composition of
Lycidas.

SONNETS.

Of poems in strict sonnet form, that is, containing neither more nor less
than fourteen decasyllable iambic lines, interlocked by some scheme of
symmetrical rhyme, not in couplets, Milton left twenty-three, of which
five are in Italian. Of the three sonnets in English omitted from this
edition, two have reference to the violent controversy occasioned by
Milton's publications in advocacy of greater freedom of divorce, and are
rough and polemic in style; the third is omitted on account of its
unimportance and lack of distinction.

In their dates the twenty-three sonnets range from the poet's
twenty-third to his fiftieth year. They are the only form of verse in
which he indulges during that middle period of his life which was
abandoned to political partisanship on the side of the Parliament in the
Civil War, and to the service of the government during the Commonwealth
and the Protectorate. If, as is now widely believed, Shakespeare's
sonnets are artificial and tell us little or nothing about their author,
those of Milton are purely natural and subjective and tell us nothing
else but what their writer was thinking and feeling. Their themes are his
veritable moods and passions. The mood is now friendly, amiable, and
serene, now bitter, strenuous, indignant, vindictive.

Wordsworth, in his sonnet, _Scorn not the Sonnet_, thus refers to
Milton's sparing