falling stars can always be seen; but when the intersection happens at
the time the shoal is passing, then there results a grand meteoric
display. Numerous other meteoric swarms travel in orbital paths round
the Sun.

Milton, in his poem, alludes to falling stars upon two occasions. In
describing the fall of Mulciber from Heaven he says:--

from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,
A summer's day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star,
On Lemnos the AEgaean isle.--i. 742-46.

The rapid flight of the archangel Uriel from the Sun to the Earth is
described in the following lines:--

Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even
On a sunbeam, swift as a shooting star
In autumn thwarts the night, when vapours fired
Impress the air, and shows the mariner
From what point of his compass to beware
Impetuous winds.--iv. 555-60.

Milton mentions the season of the year in which those stars are most
frequently seen, and refers to an ancient belief by which they were
regarded as the precursors of stormy weather. A translation from Virgil
contains a similar allusion to them--

Oft shalt thou see ere brooding storms arise,
Star after star glide headlong down the skies.

The standard borne by the Cherub Azazel is described as having--

Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind.--i. 537.

CHAPTER IX

MILTON'S IMAGINATIVE AND DESCRIPTIVE ASTRONOMY

The theme chosen by Milton for his great epic, viz. the Fall of Man and
his expulsion from Paradise--perhaps the most momentous incident in the
history of the human race--was one worthy of the genius of a great poet
and in the treatment of which Milton has been sublimely successful. The
newly created Earth; the untainted loveliness of the Paradise in which
our first parents dwelt during their innocence; their temptation; their
fall and removal from the happy garden, furnished a theme which afforded
him an opportunity for the display of his unrivalled poetic genius.

Though the chief interest in the poem is centred in the Garden of Eden
and its occupants, yet Milton was enabled, by the comprehensive manner
in which he treated his subject, to introduce into his work a cosmology
which embraced not only the system to which our globe belongs, but the
entire starry heavens by which we are surrounded. But the universality
of his genius did not rest her