tory was but at its commencement, and all the fate of nations, heroic or unheroic, lay concentrated in two sole beings moving over the face of the new-made globe. As the capabilities of this subject flashed upon his view, his soul, we will suppose, exulted, and there was no need for farther search. In the conception and completion of such a theme as that presented in the creation and the fall of man, there was not one of his manifold faculties and tendencies, small or great, but might be fully satisfied-his bent towards theology; his familiarity, traceable even in his prose-writings, with the idea of supernatural agency; his delight in imaginations of the physically vast and spacious; his exquisite sense of minute beauty; his stern moral temper; his lofty ideal of free manhood; and even his cherished belief in woman's weakness. In one negative respect also, his instinct guided him aright in leading him to such a theme. The dramatic faculty, the faculty of depicting men and women individually peculiar and distinct, was not Milton's. In those cases, indeed, where the impression of individuality could be conveyed in the one circumstance of sheer vastness, or by the representation, on a colossal scale, of Miltonic qualities of soul, no poet could delineate better. His Satan and his Samson are creations as clear and definite as any ever imagined by ancient or modern poet. In the old Greek or Eschylean drama, therefore, Milton would probably have been a master. But a dramatist in the modern or Shakspearian sense, peopling ideal worlds with men and women as distinct as those of real life-Hotspurs, Hamlets, scholars, courtiers, clowns; this he could never have been. There was in this respect, also, then, a deep reason in Milton's choice of a subject for his great work. In selecting a period of the world's history where there were but two human beings that could be objects of description, he avoided the necessity of any recondite delineation of character. An Adam with any marked peculiarity of character, or an Eve featured like one of her cultured daughters of the nineteenth century, would have been an absurdity. The great primitive father of our race did not walk in the garden of Eden inculcating on himself, as we moderns do, the duty of being earnest, firm, or specially true to this or that ideal; nor was his spouse a woman of highly intellectual tendencies. That the first man and woman should be delineated simply as man and woman, fully proportioned in all human qualities, but not unusually featured in any, was a necessity of the subject chosen. And this Milton could do. Whether, indeed, his Adam and his Eve are such splendid creatures as they might have been, even under the conditions of the case, is an open question.

As the matured condition of Milton's mind, at the time when

Contrast of Earlier and Later Poems.

331

he resumed his poetical activity, was revealed in the nature of the subjects which he then chose, so it was revealed in his mere style and manner of writing. Far less than formerly does he indulge, in his later poems, in those occult and labyrinthine windings, those delays of sensuous imagery, those bouts of linked sweetness, which were the early proofs of his poetical genius. Occasionally, indeed, there still occurs a passage conceived according to this mysterious law of the purely poetic intellect. For example, in the description of Sin and her brood at the gate of hell

more.

"Far less abhorred than these

Vexed Scylla, bathing in the sea that parts
Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore:
Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, called
In secret, riding through the air she comes,
Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance
With Lapland witches, while the labouring moon
Eclipses at their charms."

But for the most part the style is direct and obvious; each sentence marching on with a steady progressive motion towards the complete evolution of what is necessary in meaning, and nothing The opening of Paradise Regained, for instance, is as bald and terse as a piece of prose narrative; and had a prosewriter undertaken to convey precisely the same sense, he could not have conveyed it in less space. And this, in so genuine a poet as Milton, is felt to be a positive merit. To begin telling a story simply, baldly, and weightily; and to let the wealth and profusion of words, and the full organ-blow of sound, come as the story enlarges and the imagination of the speaker works more vehemently with the contending element-this is what is best in the poet of an epic theme. And this is what we find in Milton. Grand, gorgeous, and sonorous as he is throughout his Paradise Lost, it will be found that all his grandeur, all his gorgeousness, all his majesty of sound, are expended strictly and judiciously in the evolution of the transcendant tale he had undertaken to narrate in English verse.

No reader of the Paradise Lost by parts and sections, no mere admirer of its select passages, can appreciate at half its value the greatness of this sublime poem. That which is most marvellous in it, and which gives significance and proportionate excellence to all its parts, is the clear and consistent conception of scene and of plot which pervades the whole. As in the case of Dante, whose physical conception of the three regions of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, is felt to constitute so large a portion of the merits of his poem, that diagrams and pictures have been made to illustrate and explain it; so, in the case of Milton, fully to under

stand and admire the Paradise Lost, it is necessary that the reader should represent to himself, as distinctly as in a diagram or drawing, the physical universe, infinitely more vast than that of Dante, in which the story is made to enact itself. There is this difference, too, between the poem of Dante and the poem of Milton, that whereas in the one there is no plot properly so called, no progressive march of story, other than what is involved in the poet's own experience of the successive visions; in the other there is a true epic narration, a series of connected incidents, a story conducted through a tract of time.

Chronologically the poem begins within the bounds of the great universe antecedent to our system. In that measureless primeval space there were, as the poet maps it out, two huge regions or hemispheres, an upper and a lower, the one all light, the other all darkness. The upper or luminous half was Heaven, the variously-prolonged abode of the angelic hierarchies, then the sole creatures that had been called into existence. The under half was Night or Chaos, a thick, black, turbid abysm, a limitless sea or marsh of elemental pulp. No beings resided in it. But a strange event befell which changed in an unimaginable manner, the aspect and destiny of this part of space. There arose a rebellion among the celestial hierarchies; Lucifer and his proud companions, listless of their monotonous service through the ages, dared to dispute the Almighty supremacy. Hurled out of heaven, and pursued by hissing fire which burnt after them like a resistless pressure, the rebel angels were driven down through the blackness and marsh of Chaos to its uttermost pits and depths. Here, under the name of Hell, was allotted them a special region for their new abode. And now the Deity, according to his eternal counsels with his only-begotten Son, resolved to create that new system of which Man is chief. By a motion of the golden compasses there were marked out in the upper part of Chaos, where it adjoined Heaven, the limits and range of the new experiment. A huge cavity was scooped out into which the Light rushed down, contending with the Darkness. Into this cavity the creating word implanted a new principle, the principle of gravitation; and straightway all the matter within the swoop of this principle forsook the vague chaotic form, and sprang together into balls and planets. Thus arose the human universe with its stars, its galaxies, and its firmament of azure; within which universe, one central star, begirt with its related luminaries, was chosen for the particular home of Man and his lineage. Meanwhile the rebel angels in their Hell of torment underneath Chaos were scheming their revenge. Satan, their chief and leader, proposed his elaborate device. It was that, abandoning for the time all efforts to regain their lost

place in Heaven, they should turn their attention to that one point of space where God had planted his new and favoured creation. To impregnate this new universe with the venom of their rebellious spirit, to vitiate the Maker's purpose with regard to it, and thus to work out a compensation of their own fall by at least dragging down the new race to their fellowship, if indeed something more splendid might not occur in consequence-such was the Satanic plan. Charged with the task of its execution, Satan passed through Hell-gate; toiled his way upward through the turbid depths of the superincumbent Chaos; and, emerging into the light of day, gazed through the balmy ether towards the sapphire floor of his former home. For a moment he forgot his errand; then, selecting our Sun from amid the myriads of luminaries that glittered in the peaceful concave, winged his flight towards it to obtain the fell intelligence. Thence, marking for his prey our one unconscious star sleeping in the distance with the small attending moon, he hastened to end his voyage. As he neared it, and neared the planet, its shining mass grew larger to the view; the features of sea and continent came forth to sight; and at last alighting on its rotund surface, he trod the sward of Eden in the neighbourhood of the fated pair. Here lying in wait, and weaving his wiles, he consummated his proposed design; the forbidden fruit was eaten; Sin and Death entered the new-made world; and Satan, rejoining his expectant companions, filled Hell with the joyful tidings.

The poem is, in fact, a Sataniad. Five-sixths of it treat of transactions done amid the great infinitudes of space while our earth was either non-existent, or recognised but as a starry point selected for attack. Only in the remaining sixth do we walk amid terrestrial landscapes and vegetation, and see events transpire earthly in kind, and amenable to the laws of human mode and sequence. If we regard Satan as the hero, then the poem is the story of that portion of the existence of this being, when, not yet the devil of our universe, he determined, by free act of will, to become such, renouncing with his dignity of archangel all concern or intercourse with the larger realms of space, and deliberately narrowing the sphere of his activity to our finite and corruptible world. In this point of view the Mephistopheles of Goethe might be considered as a prolongation of the same being, an appended representation of his character when six thousand years of labour in his restricted vocation had despoiled him of his sublimer satanic traits, and reduced him to one unvarying aspect of shrewd and scoffing malevolence. And intermediate between the two, though nearer to Mephistopheles than to Satan, might be placed the Tempter of Paradise Regained.

Conceiving, as we do, that all the incidents, whether of internal or of external history, that befell Milton in that middle period of his life which intervened between his earlier and his later poetical labours, formed conjointly but the necessary preparation for the composition of his final master-piece, we are disposed to assign quite a peculiar importance in this respect to the one incident of his blindness. The blindness of Milton was an actual qualification for the writing of the Paradise Lost. We do not allude merely to such general effects of his blindness as consisted in the habit of serene and daring contemplation to which it must have given rise, or in the habit of mental versification and subsequent oral dictation which it imposed. We allude to effects more signal and specific. The fundamental conception of Paradise Lost, so far as that conception is physical, is precisely that conception of opposed light and darkness which is easiest and most natural to a blind man. Light against a background of blackness-light in masses; light in belts or zones; light in extended discs or spheres; light in glittering star-points; light in bursts and conflagrations; light in gleams, streaks, waves, or coruscations; light in diffused mist or powder, is the prevailing material image, and necessarily so throughout five-sixths of Paradise Lost. When the rebel angels are thrust down into hell, God's wrath pursues them through the darkness like a lurid funnel of descending fire. When Satan alights on the sun he is like a spot on its surface seen through a telescope. When Raphael wings his way from star to star, his path through the interspaces is a track of radiance. When Gabriel and the rest of the angelic host, provoked by Satan's defiance, begin to hem him round, the figure is, that they shape their phalanx like a crescent-moon. When Satan, couched like a toad at the ear of Eve, is touched by the spear of Ithuriel, his rise is like the explosion of a powder-magazine. Had a poet with the full use of his sight undertaken the subject which Milton sets forth by such recurring images as these, he would have been obliged to have recourse to images of exactly the same kind, just as in our conceptions of heaven light is felt to be the only adequate medium of visual description. We question, however, if the visual contrast between light and darkness could have been so consistently maintained, and so wondrously varied, by any other than a man whose daily thoughts about each and every subject were, and seemed to himself but as so many lucid phantasms in a chamber of extended gloom.

If, however, Milton's blindness was a positive qualification in these five-sixths of the poem, where the scene lies in the celestial spaces, it was surely a disadvantage, it may be said, in that remaining portion of the poem where the descriptions