While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:

And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, 190

cadh, known, from cunnan, to know), unknown. So most of the critics interpret the word in this line, as being a natural expression of a young man looking forward to future fame. But perhaps it should have its modern sense, and be interpreted as a modest acknowledgment of rudeness or awkwardness. The swain, of course, is Milton, who now speaks in his own character.

187. While the still morn went out with sandals gray. 'Alluding,' say Stevens and Morris, 'to the gray appearance of the sky just before sunrise.' See Par. Regained, IV. 426, 427. May it mean the gray of the clouds and sky when morning is just vanishing later in the day? I am not aware that the exquisite beauty of this line has been commented upon. It is equal to the famous verses of Shakespeare, which Richard Grant White quotes to prove the superiority of Shakespeare's imagination over Milton's,

"But look, the morn in russet mantle clad

Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill";

for this line of Milton's, more musical than these of Shakespeare, is also more condensed; and then it adds the charm of stillness.

188. Stops, vent-holes of a flute or pipe. So in Shakes. 2 Henry IV., Induction, 17; Hamlet, III. ii. 76, 376, 381. Quills (Lat. calamus, reed, or caulis, a stalk; Ger. kiel), originally reed-pipes, the tubes of wind instruments. Spenser speaks of the 'homely shepherd's quill.' Johnson thought it the plectrum, and quoted Dryden's Virgil, Eneid, VI. 646, "His quill strikes seven notes" but this meaning does not so well suit this passage. The various quills are changes of mood and metre - 'the varied strains of the elegy' or themes of the poem (at lines 76, 88, 113, 132, 165). "This almost amounts to a recognition on the part of the poet of the irregularity of style, the mixture of different and even opposing themes." Jerram.

189. Eager, earnest, intent, keen. Doric lay (the Awpis dodá of the Greek pastoral poet Moschus, who flourished in Syracuse about 270 B. C., and who composed a beautiful elegy on his fellow-poet Bion), pastoral song. Theocritus, too, was a native of the Dorian colony at Syracuse. Doric, pertaining to the Dorians, a people of ancient Greece. In music, the Doric was severe, austere, or grave; the Lydian was soft, sweet, or pathetic; the Phrygian, sprightly, animated; the Ionic, airy, fanciful.

190. Stretched out. Stretched them out into shadow? In the last line of Virgil's first Eclogue we find, "Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbræ," and larger shadows fall from the lofty mountains. Do these lines mean that the poet was engaged from dawn till sunset in composing this lay?

And now was dropped into the western bay.
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

191. At the end of Spenser's Pastoral Eglogue upon the Death of Sir Philip Sidney, we have the line,

"The sun, lo! hastened hath his face to steep

In western waves,"

as a reason for ceasing to sing.

192. He. The 'swain.' Twitched, caught up or snatched. Keightley says, 'drew tightly about him on account of the chilliness of the evening.' This picturesque ending expresses haste, as if conscious that in his absorption in 'eager thought' he had tarried too long. Mantle blue. R. C. Browne in his notes hints that the mantle was, like that of Hudibras, 'Presbyterian true blue !'

193. In Fletcher's Purple Island (1633) occurs the line,

"To-morrow shall ye feast in pastures new."

Says Masson, "This is a parting intimation that the imaginary shepherd is Milton himself, and that the poem is a tribute to his dead friend rendered passingly in the midst of other occupations." "It is better," says Jerram, "to refer these words to the projected Italian tour, with which his mind must now have been occupied, than to any political intentions at this time."

For an interesting critical examination and exposition of lines 108-129, see Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, pp. 26-34. (Wiley and Son, N. Y., 1866.)

New School Shakespeare.

We would call the attention of teachers of Shakespeare to the following points in favor of Hudson's School Edition:

First. Mr. Hudson has been a special student and teacher of Shakespeare for more than forty years, and as a result of this study and experience he claims that only such notes should be given to the pupil as will aid him to a correct understanding of the author's meaning, rather than that the text should be used as the basis of philological study.

Second. He does not consider it wise to confuse and perplex the pupil with the contradictory explanations of different editors; but that the editor should give the pupil the advantage of his own judgment, by placing before him that one interpretation which he considers will be of the greatest service to the pupil.

Third. The notes should be placed at the foot of the page, in order to be easily accessible, so as to take the pupil as little as possible from the consideration of the thought of the author. At least nineteen in twenty pupils will pass over an obscure word or phrase without understanding it, rather than stay to look up the explanation in another part of the volume.

GINN, HEATH, & CO.,

Publishers,

13 Tremont Place, 4 Bond Street, 180 Wabash Avenue,

BOSTON.

NEW YORK.

CHICAGO.