Page:Shelley, a poem, with other writings (Thomson, Debell).djvu/76

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58
NOTES ON THE STRUCTURE OF

This is the day which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism.

It is assuredly no very high work, thus extorting from a great poem an exact account of its employment of every hour, as if it were a prisoner at the bar whose defence rested on an alibi; but zealous and accurate students will not disdain it in its own lower sphere any more than such students disdain precise measurements of proportion in great works of painting and sculpture. And, not to speak of similar investigations concerning other dramas, men no less justly eminent than Jean Paul Richter and De Quincey have applied such criticism to the period of the action of "Paradise Lost."[1]

III. Is there any possible conciliation of the two caves in Act III. sc. iii.? Prometheus is no sooner released than he describes elaborately to Asia and her fair sister nymphs a certain forest cave, with fountain and stalactites, "A simple dwelling, which shall be our own," and yet more elaborately the mode of life he and they

  1. In Mure's "Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece" (Vol. I., Appendix F: "On the 'Self-ontradictions' of Virgil, Milton, Cervantes, Walter Scott, and other popular Authors, as compared with those of Homer) some of Milton's anachronisms in a single book of the "Paradise Lost" are thus summarized:—"Milton informs us that when the Messiah came down from heaven [near sunset, x. 92] to judge our first parents, after the Fall, Satan, shunning his presence, returned to hell by night (x. 341). On his way he meets Sin and Death on their road to Paradise in the morning (x. 329). After Sin and Death had arrived in Paradise, Adam is represented as lamenting aloud to himself 'through the still night' (x. 846). The ensuing day (assuming day to have now at last really dawned) is afterwards described by the same Adam as the day of the Fall (x. 962); in another place it is described as a day several days subsequent to that of the Fall (x. 1050)."