Note With thrice great Hermes — MILTON’S MINOR POEMS.

88. With thrice great Hermes. “Hermes Trismegistos—Hermes thrice-greatest—is the name given by the Neo-Platonists and the devotees of mysticism and alchemy to the Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as more or less identified with the Grecian Hermes, and as the author of all mysterious doctrines, and especially of the secrets of alchemy.” (The New Eng. Dicty.) To such studies the serious mediæval scholars devoted themselves. To unsphere the spirit of Plato is to call him from the sphere in which he abides in the other world, or, simply, to take in hand for study his writings on immortality.