Page:Paradise lost by Milton, John.djvu/281

Heroic deemed, chief mastery to dissect,
With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights,30
In battles feigned—the better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
Unsung—or to describe races and games,
Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,
Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights
At joust and torneament; then marshalled feast
Served up in hall with sewers and seneshals;
The skill of artifice or office mean,
Not that which justly gives heroic name40
To person or to poem. Me, of these
Nor skilled nor studious, higher argument
Remains, sufficient of itself to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing,
Depressed; and much they may if all be mine,
Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.
The sun was sunk, and after him the star
Of Hesperus, whose office is to bring
Twilight upon the earth, short arbiter50
'Twixt day and night; and now from end to end
Night's hemisphere had veiled the horizon round,
When Satan, who late fled, before the threats
Of Gabriel, out of Eden, now improved
In meditated fraud and malice, bent
On Man's destruction, maugre what might hap