223. his dusky eyn. This ancient plural of eye occurs several times in Shakespeare, as in As You Like It IV 3 50. 240. Heaven's youngest-teemed star. Compare Comus 175. 241. Hath fixed her polished car. _Fix_ has its proper meaning, _stopped_. The star "came and stood over where the young child was." ON SHAKESPEARE. The first edition of the collected works of Shakespeare, known as the first folio, was published in 1623, when Milton was fifteen years old. The second Shakespeare folio appeared in 1632. Among the commendatory verses by various hands prefixed, after the fashion of the time, to the latter volume, was a little piece of eight couplets, in which some then unknown rhymer expressed his admiration of the great poet. Collecting his poems for publication in 1645, Milton included these couplets, gave them the date 1630, and the title _On Shakespeare_ which they have since borne in his works. The fact that he wrote the verses two years before their publication in the Shakespeare folio shows that he did not produce them to order, for the special occasion. It is interesting to note that Milton at twenty-two was an appreciative reader of Shakespeare. The lines themselves give no hint of great poetic genius; they are a fair specimen of the conventional, labored eulogy in vogue at the time. 4. star-ypointing. To make the decasyllabic verse, the poet takes the liberty of prefixing to the present participle the _y_ which properly belongs only to the past. 8. a livelong monument. Instead of _livelong_, the first issue of the lines, in the Shakespeare folio of 1632, has _lasting_. The change is Milton's, appearing in his revision of his poems in 1645. Does it seem to be an improvement? 10-12. and that each heart hath ... took. The conjunction _that_ simply repeats the _whilst_. 11. thy unvalued book. In Hamlet I 3 19 _unvalued persons_ are persons of no value, or of no rank. In Macbeth III 1 94 the _valued file_ is the file that determines values or ranks. In Milton's phrase the _unvalued book_ means the book whose merit is so great as to be beyond all valuation: a new rank must be created for it. 12. Those Delphic lines: lines so crowded with meaning as to seem the utterances of an oracle. 13. our fancy of itself bereaving: transporting us into an ecstasy, or making us rapt with thought. 14. Dost make _us_ marble with too much conceiving. The concentrated attention required to penetrate Shakespeare's meaning makes statues of us. 15. Make the word sepulchred fit metrically into the iambic verse. L'ALLEGRO AND IL PENSEROSO. The year in which the poems were composed is uncertain. Masson regards 1632 as the probable date.