Showing (conjecturally) Milton's cosmography, -the Empyreal Heavens, our Starry Universe, Hell, and Chaos. See Preface.

[For a perhaps more satisfactory diagram, see page 109.]

ΤΟ

THE TEACHERS AND STUDENTS OF OUR ENGLISH

LITERATURE,

THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED

BY

THEIR FRIEND AND FELLOW-WORKER,

THE EDITOR.

PREFACE.

THIS little book, the outgrowth of teaching, is designed to meet the wants of students. Among the points of difference between it and similar editions, it includes some of the best results of recent investigation, and it omits certain passages that jar on the reverence due to youth.' With very slight exceptions the text is Masson's.*

6

The notes may seem at first sight too numerous; but many of them are intended for teachers, and examination will show that they are calculated to stimulate rather than supersede thought.

The introductory matter should be read carefully before beginning the critical study.

The diagrams will assist in understanding Milton's cosmography. Probably no one of them will be found entirely satisfactory; but if they awaken the student's interest, if they aid his imagination, and if they lead him to a closer study of the poem, the object of introducing them will have been gained. Some explanation of the two which stand respec

* In regard to the use of capital letters, the authority of Wilson on Punctuation has generally been followed.

tively at the beginning and at the end may here be appro priate.

Milton recognizes the sphere as the normal shape of worlds. And so, in the 'void profound' of infinite space, during the cycles of past eternity, lay that vast aggregation of matter which constituted the luminous Empyreal Heavens above and the black abysses of Chaos beneath. He tells us that heaven is

like earth.

"What if earth

Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought?"

To use Brooke's eloquent description in his incomparable Milton Primer, "Heaven is on high, indefinitely extended, and walled towards Chaos with a crystal wall having opal towers and sapphire battlements. In the wall a vast gate opens on Chaos, and from it runs a broad and ample road, 'powdered with stars,' whose dust is gold, to the throne of God. The throne is in the midst of Heaven, high on the sacred hill, lost in ineffable light. . . . Around the hill is the vast plain clothed with flowers, watered by living streams among the trees of life, where on great days the angelic assembly meets; and nearer to the hill is the pavement like a sea of jasper. Beyond are vast regions, where are the blissful bowers of amarantine shade, fountain, or spring,' . . . and among them the archangels have their royal seats built as Satan's was, far blazing on a hill, of diamond quarries and of golden rocks."

Like those of earth, this continent of spacious heaven' has its ocean. That ocean is Chaos. It lies beside and beneath

*Milton Primer, pp. 84, 85, by Stopford A. Brooke (D. Appleton & Co's Series of Classical Writers).