“As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the Sun; and the moist star, Upon whose influence Neptune’s Empire stands, Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.” —_Hamlet_, act i. sc. 1. In _King Lear_ we seem to come upon something very definitely historical, but I am not able to say what it is. The Earl of Gloster says:— “These late eclipses in the Sun and Moon portend no good to us.” With this, Edmund, Gloster’s son, apparently agrees, for he exclaims:— “These eclipses do portend these divisions.” —Act i. sc. 2. In _Othello_, the Moor of Venice himself, in a moment of excitement, says:— “O, insupportable! O, heavy hour! Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse Of Sun and Moon, and that the affrighted globe Should yawn at alteration.” —Act v. sc. 2. In _Anthony and Cleopatra_ we find Anthony expressing what our forefathers so often thought in connection with astronomical matters:— “Alack, our terrine Moon is now eclipsed; And it portends alone The fall of Anthony!” —Act iii. sc. 11. Milton has an allusion to an eclipse of the Sun which possesses a two-fold interest—intrinsic and extrinsic. The former feature will be self-evident when the passage is read. The poet, in describing[166] the faded splendour of the fallen archangel, compares him to the Sun seen under circumstances which have temporarily deprived it of its normal brilliancy and glory:— “As when the Sun new-risen Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams, or, from behind the Moon In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes Monarchs.” It has been well said by Dr. Orchard[167] that “this passage affords us an example of the sublimity of Milton’s imagination and of his skill in adapting the grandest phenomena of nature to the illustration of his subject.” What I alluded to in saying that extrinsic interest attached to this quotation, is the fact that these lines might have caused the suppression of the poem as a whole. Mrs. Todd puts the matter thus:—“_Paradise Lost_ was begun probably in 1658, although not finished until 1663, nor its thorough revision completed until 1665. The censorship still existed, and Tomkyns (one of the chaplains through whom the Archbishop gave or refused license), although a broader-minded man than many of his day, found this passage especially objectionable. The poem was allowed to see the light only through the interposition of a friend of Milton. Upon such slender chances may hang the life of an incomparable work of art! But it is easy to see that in the turbulent days when Charles the Second had returned to power, after the death of Cromwell, these lines should have been deemed dangerously suggestive, in imputing to monarchs ‘perplexity’ and ‘fear of change.’” Other allusions to eclipses by Milton will be found as follows:—