Paradise Lost, vernal airs in Eden

John Milton published Paradise Lost in 1667 in ten books, and a second edition of 1674 divided it into twelve. He was blind by then and dictated the poem to helpers. He was paid five pounds for the first edition, with a further payment promised on later printings. Project Gutenberg carries the full poem.

Where this text comes fromThere is nothing to see in this passage. Birds, air, the smell of a field, the sound of a choir: everything named is heard or smelled, and not one visual detail appears in thirty-six words. That is worth noticing in a poem otherwise crowded with light and color, and readers have long taken it as a passage where the poet’s own circumstances show through the description. It is also, at 209 characters, the shortest fragment in the English corpus here.

What you might not noticeThe word quire appears where a modern text would print choir. It is the older spelling of the same word and had not yet been separated from the sense of a gathering of pages. Source

What it trainsThirty-six words, one sentence, six commas and a single semicolon in 209 characters. The passage is short enough to be typed in under a minute, which makes it a good measurement of clean speed, but nine of its characters are capitals and eight of those sit inside the sentence, half of them at verse line openings and half in the middle of a line. There are no hyphens, no dashes, no quotation marks and nothing longer than nine letters. What it tests is whether your Shift timing survives a fast run.

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg