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:--

Through the air she comes,
"Lur'd with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the labouring Moon
Eclipses at their char