“A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men’s names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.” (ll. 205–209.) When Comus, then, begins to practise the more dangerous art of this witchery, acting in accordance with his confession of his manner,— “under fair pretence of friendly ends, And well-placed words of glozing courtesy, Baited with reasons not unplausible,”— (ll. 160–162.) she responds to the attack with an account of the great power of chastity. Only because she sees that he is trying to deceive her judgment does she deign to answer him. “I had not thought to have unlocked my lips In this unhallowed air, but that this juggler Would think to charm my judgment, as mine eyes, Obtruding false rules pranked in reason’s garb.” (ll. 756–759.) She then intimates the power which the doctrine of chastity has to overcome Comus, and states that, should she attempt to unfold it, the enthusiasm of her soul would be such as to overwhelm him and his magic structures. “Enjoy your dear wit, and gay rhetoric, That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence; Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced. Yet, should I try, the uncontrollèd worth Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits To such a flame of sacred vehemence That dumb things would be moved to sympathize, And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake, Till all thy magic structures, reared so high, Were shattered into heaps o’er thy false head.” (ll. 790–799.) This vehemence of moral enthusiasm in Milton is due to the conception of chastity as an “abstracted sublimity.” He learned it, he says, in his study of Platonic philosophy; but the teaching of it as a positive doctrine applied to human conduct is his own contribution, and strikes the characteristic note of his idealism. In Plato he found only the suggestion of this teaching. It lay in that idea of the “Phædo,” already explained, of the destruction of the soul’s purity through sense knowledge. Milton’s imagination, working upon this idea, transformed it in a way peculiar to himself alone. The pure soul, according to his belief, has power in itself to change the body to its own pure essence. The conversion of body to soul, however, is not a tenet of Platonic philosophy in any phase. It was the working in Milton of that tendency, visible throughout the poetry of the seventeenth century, to assert the primacy of the soul in life—an attempt which was made by the metaphysical poets especially in their treatment of love.