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 Ægon suggests the willows: “ The streams," says lovely Amyntas; 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. Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating. All, by the law of their kind, companions equally common; Such too the law of the deep, where Proteus down on the shingle Pin him in air, or he lie transfixed by the reed of the ditcher,- 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, 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!” Swains of the Tuscan land, well-practised youths in the Muses, 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." I too, for strangely my pipe for some time past had been sounding 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), Go unpastured, my lambs: your master now heeds not your bleating. Gave me, a wonder of art, which himself, a wonder of nature, 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, Nor is it meagre souls and the base-born breasts of the vulgar "Thou too art there,-not vain is the hope that I cherish, my Damon,- No; not down in Lethe's darkness ought we to seek thee! Pure, he possesses the sky; he has spurned back the arc of the rainbow. All the celestials shall know thee, while shepherds shall still call thee Damon. Ever were dear to thee, and the marriage joy never was tasted, There where song never fails, and the lyre and the dance mix to madness, 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 |