Roasts the ripe pear, and the chestnuts crackle beneath, while the South-wind Hurls confusion without, and thunders down on the elm-tops?

Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating. Then, in the summer, when day spins round on his middlemost axle, What time Pan takes his sleep concealed in the shade of the beeches, And when the nymphs have repaired to their well-known grots in the rivers, Shepherds are not to be seen and under the hedge snores the rustic, Who will bring me again thy blandishing ways and thy laughter, All thy Athenian jests, and all the fine wit of thy fancies?

Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating. Now all lonely I wander over the fields and the pastures,

Or where the branchy shades are densest down in the valleys;

There I wait till late, while the shower and the storm-blast above me
Moan at their will, and sighings shake through the breaks of the woodlands.
Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.
Ah! how my fields, once neat, are now overgrown and unsightly,
Forward only in weeds, and the tall corn sickens with mildew !
Mateless, my vines droop down the shrivelled weight of their clusters;
Neither please me my myrtles; and even the sheep are a trouble ;
They seem sad, and they turn their faces, poor things, to their master!
Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.
Tityrus calls to the hazels; to the ash-trees Alphesibous;

Ægon suggests the willows: “ The streams," says lovely Amyntas;
"Here are the cool springs, here the moss-broidered grass and the hillocks;
"Here are the zephyrs, and here the arbutus whispers the ripple."
These things they sing to the deaf; so I took to the thickets and left them.
Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.
Mopsus addressed me next, for he had espied me returning
(Wise in the language of birds, and wise in the stars too, is Mopsus):
66 Thyrsis," he said, "what is this? what bilious humour afflicts thee?
"Either love is the cause, or the blast of some star inauspicious;
"Saturn's star is of all the oftenest deadly to shepherds,
"Fixing deep in the breast his slant leaden shaft of sickness."

Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating. Round me fair maids wonder: “What will come of thee, Thyrsis? "What wouldst thou have?" they say: "not commonly see we the young men "Wearing that cloud on the brow, the eyes thus stern and the visage : "Youth seeks the dance and sports, and in all will tend to be wooing : 'Rightfully so: twice wretched is he who is late in his loving."

Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.
Dryope came, and Hyas, and Ægle, the daughter of Baucis
(Learned is she in the song and the lute, but O what a proud one !);
Came to me Chloris also, the maid from the banks of the Chelmer.
Nothing their blandishings move me, nothing their prattle of comfort;
Nothing the present can move me, nor any hope of the future.

Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.
Ah me! how like one another the herds frisk over the meadows,

All, by the law of their kind, companions equally common;
No one selecting for friendship this one rather than that one
Out of the flock! So come in droves to their feeding the jackals;
So in their turns pair also the rough untameable zebras.

Such too the law of the deep, where Proteus down on the shingle
Numbers his troops of sea-calves. Nay, that meanest of wing'd ones,
See how the sparrow has always near him a fellow, when flying
Round by the barns he chirrups, but seeks his own thatch ere it darkens ;
Whom should fate strike lifeless,-whether the beak of the falcon

Pin him in air, or he lie transfixed by the reed of the ditcher,-
Quick the survivor is off, and a moment finds him re-mated.
We are the hard race, we, the battered children of fortune,
We of the breed of men, strange-minded and different-moulded!
Scarcely does any discover his one true mate among thousands;
Or, if kindlier chance shall have given the singular blessing,
Comes a dark day on the creep, and comes the hour unexpected,
Snatching away the gift, and leaving the anguish eternal.

Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating. Ah! what roaming whimsy drew my steps to a distance,

Over the rocks hung in air and the Alpine passes and glaciers!

Was it so needful for me to have seen old Rome in her ruins,

Even though Rome had been such as, erst in the days of her greatness,
Tityrus, only to visit, forsook both his flocks and his country,—
That but for this I consented to lack the dear use of thy presence,
Placing so many seas and so many mountains between us,

So many woods and rocks and so many murmuring rivers?

Ah! at the end at least to have touched his hand had been given me, Closed his beautiful eyes in the placid hour of his dying,

Said to my friend "Farewell! in the world of the stars think of me!”
Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.
Albeit also of you my memory never shall weary,

Swains of the Tuscan land, well-practised youths in the Muses,
Here there was grace and lightness; Tuscan thou too, my Damon,
Tracing the line of thy race from the ancient city of Lucca !
O, how mighty was I, when, stretched by the stream of the Arno
Murmuring cool, and where the poplar-grove softens the herbage,
Violets now I would pluck, and now the sprigs of the myrtle,
Hearing Menalcas and Lycidas vying the while in their ditties!
I also dared the challenge; nor, as I reckon, the hearers
Greatly disliked my trials,-for yet the tokens are with me,
Rush-plaits, osier nets, and reed-stops of wax, which they gave me.
Ay more two of the group have taught our name to their beechwoods,--
Dati and also Francini, both of them notable shepherds,

As well in lore as in voice, and both of the blood of the Lydian.

Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating. Then too the pleasant dreams which the dewy moon woke within me, Penning the young kids alone within their wattles at even!

Ah! how often I said, when already the black mould bewrapt thee, "Now my Damon is singing, or spreading his snares for the leveret ; "Now he is weaving his twig-net for some of his various uses." What with my easy mind I hoped as then in the future

Lightly I seized with the wish and fancied as present before me. "Ho! my friend!" I would cry: "art busy? If nothing prevent thee, "Shall we go rest somewhere in some talk-favouring covert,

"Or to the waters of Colne, or the fields of Cassibelaunus ?

"There thou shalt run me over the list of thy herbs and their juices,

"Foxglove, and crocuses lowly, and hyacinth-leaf with its blossom,

Marsh-plants also that grow for use in the art of the healer."
Perish the plants each one, and perish all arts of the healer
Gotten of herbs, since nothing served they even their master!

I too, for strangely my pipe for some time past had been sounding
Strains of an unknown strength,—'tis one day more than eleven since
Thus it befell, and perchance the reeds I was trying were new ones :
Bursting their fastenings they flew apart when touched, and no farther
Dared to endure the grave sounds: I am haply in this over-boastful;
Yet I will tell out the tale. Ye woods, yield your honours and listen!
Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.
I have a theme of the Trojans cruising our southern headlands
Shaping to song, and the realm of Imogen, daughter of Pandras,
Brennus and Arvirach, dukes, and Bren's bold brother, Belinus ;
Then the Armorican settlers under the laws of the Britons,
Ay, and the womb of Igraine fatally pregnant with Arthur,
Uther's son, whom he got disguised in Gorlois' likeness,
All by Merlin's craft. O then, if life shall be spared me,

Thou shalt be hung, my pipe, far off on some brown dying pine-tree,

Much forgotten of me; or else your Latian music

Changed for the British war-screech! What then? For one to do all things, One to hope all things, fits not ! Prize sufficiently ample

Mine, and distinction great (unheard of ever thereafter

Though I should be, and inglorious, all through the world of the stranger),
If but yellow-haired Ouse shall read me, the drinker of Alan,
Humber, which whirls as it flows, and Trent's whole valley of orchards,
Thames, my own Thames, above all, and Tamar's western waters,
Tawny with ores, and where the white waves swinge the far Orkneys.

Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating.
These I was keeping for thee, wrapt up in the rind of the laurel,
These and other things with them; and mainly the two cups which Manso,—
Manso, not the last of Southern Italy's glories,—

Gave me, a wonder of art, which himself, a wonder of nature,
Carved with a double design of his own well-skilled invention :
Here the Red Sea in the midst, and the odoriferous summer,
Araby's winding shores, and palm-trees sweating their balsams,
Mid which the bird divine, earth's marvel, the singular Phoenix,
Blazing cærulean-bright with wings of different colours,

Turns to behold Aurora surmounting the glassy-green billows:

Obverse is Heaven's vast vault and the great Olympian mansion.

Who would suppose it? Even here is Love and his cloud-painted quiver,
Arms glittering torch-lit, and arrows tipped with the fire-gem.

Nor is it meagre souls and the base-born breasts of the vulgar
Hence that he strikes; but, whirling round him his luminous splendours,
Always he scatters his darts right upwards sheer through the star-depths
Restless, and never deigns to level the pain of them downwards;
Whence the sacred minds and the forms of the gods ever-burning.

"Thou too art there,-not vain is the hope that I cherish, my Damon,-
Thou too art certainly there; for whither besides could have vanished
Holy-sweet fancies like thine, and purity stainless as thine was?

No; not down in Lethe's darkness ought we to seek thee!
Tears are not fitting for thee, nor for thee will we weep any longer;
Flow no more, ye tear-drops! Damon inhabits the ether;

Pure, he possesses the sky; he has spurned back the arc of the rainbow.
Housed mid the souls of the heroes, housed mid the gods everlasting,
Quaffs he the sacred chalices, drinks he the joys of the blessed,
Holy-mouthed himself. But O, Heaven's rights being now thine,
Be thou with me for my good, however I ought to invoke thee,
Whether still as our Damon, or whether of names thou wouldst rather
That of Diodati now; by which deep-meaning divine name

All the celestials shall know thee, while shepherds shall still call thee Damon.
For that the rosy blush and the unstained strength of young manhood

Ever were dear to thee, and the marriage joy never was tasted,
Lo! there are kept for thee the honours of those that were virgin!
Thou, with thy fair head crowned with the golden, glittering cincture,
Waving green branches of palm, and walking the gladsome procession,
Aye shalt act and repeat the endless heavenly nuptials,

There where song never fails, and the lyre and the dance mix to madness,
There where the revel rages and Sion's thyrsus beats time."

Both

The reader will perceive here a passionateness of personal grief, an evidence of tears and sobbings in the act of writing, to which there is nothing equivalent in the English Lycidas, affectionate and exquisitely beautiful though that poem is. Yet the two poems are, in a sense, companions, and ought to be recollected in connexion. are pastorals in both the form is that of a surviving shepherd bewailing the death of a dear fellow-shepherd. In the one case the dead shepherd is named Lycidas, while the surviving shepherd who mourns him is left unnamed, and is seen only at the end as the "uncouth swain" who has been singing; in the other the dead shepherd is named Damon, and Milton, under the name of Thyrsis, is avowedly the shepherd who laments him. The reader may here

refer to what has been said in the Introduction to Lycidas concerning the Pastoral form of Poetry and the objections that have been taken to it. What was said there in defence of the Pastoral form, or in explanation of its real nature, is even more necessary here; for not only is the Epitaphium Damonis also a pastoral, but it is a pastoral of the most artificial variety. It is in Latin; and this, in itself, removes it into the realm of the artificial. But, in the Latin, the precedents of the Greek pastoralists, Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, as well as of the Latin Virgil, have been studied, and every device of classic pastoralism has been imitated. There are the sheep, the kids, the reeden flutes, the pastures, the shepherds and shepherdesses wondering at the mourner and coming round him to comfort him; the measure used is the Virgilian Hexameter, and the poem is broken into musical parts or bursts by a recurring phrase as in some of the Greek Idylls; the names used for the shepherds and shepherdesses are from the Greek Idyllists or from Virgil; the very title of the poem is an echo of that of the third Idyll of Moschus, Epitaphium Bionis. All the more strange, to those whose notions of the Pastoral have not gone beyond Dr. Johnson's in his criticism of Lycidas, may seem the fact that in this Latin pastoral, the Epitaphium Damonis, the pastoralism of which is more subtle and artificial in every point than that of the corresponding English poem, Milton is found, undeniably, and with an earnestness which breaks through the assumed guise and thrills the nerves of the reader, speaking his own heart.

While the reader notes the keen and varied expression of Milton's grief and of his affection for his lost friend, and the mingling of this grief and affection with his recollections of Italy and the new friends he had made there, especially those of the Florentine group and the Neapolitan Manso, he will rest a little, for special reasons, over the memorable autobiographic passage (already quoted by us at p. 83), in which Milton puts on paper, more minutely, and in a more emphatic manner, what he had already hinted in his Latin poem to Manso viz. that at this period of his life his thoughts were full of the project of an Epic Poem in English, founded on British legendary History, and especially on the subject of King Arthur.

In both Milton's editions of his Minor Poems the Epitaphium Damonis is treated with special typographical respect. In the edition of 1645 it comes last in the volume, and with the title and argument, at the beginning, printed on a right-hand page, so as to separate the