be steady
Coming immediately after allusions to the treacherous Ulysses and
murderous Lady Macbeth, this injunction bears the stamp of one who, using
like rhetoric, exhorted his comrades to throw off a similar despondency:
"Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!" (Paradise Lost,
I.330).
Satan, too, standing on his perseverance in a lost cause,
represents himself as being
one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same. . . .
-- I.252-56
