The world's great epics group themselves in two divisions, which may be
roughly defined as the natural and the artificial. The spontaneous or
self-created epic is a confluence of traditions, reduced to symmetry by
the hand of a master. Such are the Iliad, the Odyssey, the great Indian
and Persian epics, the Nibelungen Lied. In such instances it may be
fairly said that the theme has chosen the poet, rather than the poet the
theme. When the epic is a work of reflection, the poet has deliberately
selected his subject, and has not, in general, relied so much upon the
wealth of pre-existing materials as upon the capabilities of a single
circumstance. Such are the epics of Virgil, Camoens, Tasso, Milton;
Dante, perhaps, standing alone as the one epic poet (for we cannot rank
Ariosto and Spenser in this class) who owes everything but his creed to
his own invention. The traditional epic, created by the people and only
moulded by the minstrel, is so infinitely the more important for the
history of culture, that, since this new field of investigation has
become one of paramount interest, the literary epic has been in danger
of neglect. Yet it must be allowed that to evolve an epic out of a
single incident is a greater intellectual achievement than to weave one
out of a host of ballads. We must also admit that, leaving the unique
Dante out of account, Milton essayed a more arduous enterprise than any
of his predecessors, and in this point of view may claim to stand above
them all. We are so accustomed to regard the existence of "Paradise
Lost" as an ultimate fact, that we but imperfectly realize the gigantic
difficulty and audacity of the undertaking. To paint the bloom of
Paradise with the same brush that has depicted the flames and blackness
of the nether world; to make the Enemy of Mankind, while preserving this
character, an heroic figure, not without claims on sympathy and
admiration; to lend fit speech to the father and mother of humanity, to
angels and archangels, and even Deity itself;--these achievements
required a Michael Angelo shorn of his strength in every other province
of art, that all might be concentrated in song.
It is easy to represent "Paradise Lost" as obsolete by pointing out that
its demonology and angelology have for us become mere mythology. This
criticism is more formidable in appearance than in reality. The vital
question for the poet is his own belief, not the belief of his readers.
If the Iliad has survived not merely the decay of faith in the Olympian
divinities, but the criticism which has pulverized Achilles as a
historical personage, "Paradise Lost" need not be much affected by
general disbelief in the personality of Satan, and universal disbelief
in that of Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. A far more vulnerable point is
the failure of the purpose so ostentatiously proclaimed, "To justify the
ways of God to men." This problem was absolutely insoluble on Milton's
data, except by denying the divine foreknowledge, a course not open to
him. The conduct of the Deity who allows his adversary to ruin his
innocent creature from the purely malignant motive
"That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation,"
without further interposition than a warning which he foresees will be
fruitless, implies a grievous deficiency either in wisdom or in
goodness, or at best falsifies the declaration:
"Necessity and chance
Approach me not, and what I will is fate."
The like flaw runs through the entire poem, where Satan alone is
resolute and rational. Nothing can exceed the imbecility of the angelic
guard to which Man's defence is entrusted. Uriel, after threatening to
drag Satan in chains back to Tartarus, and learning by a celestial
portent that he actually has the power to fulfil his threat,
considerately draws the fiend's attention to the circumstance, and
advises him to take himself off, which Satan judiciously does, with the
intention of returning as soon as convenient. The angels take all
possible pains to prevent his gaining an entrance into Paradise, but
omit to keep Adam and Eve themselves in sight, notwithstanding the
strong hint they have received by finding the intruder
"Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,
Assaying by his devilish art to reach
The organs of her fancy, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams."
If anything more infatuated can be imagined, it is the simplicity of the
All-Wise Himself in entrusting the wardership of the gate of Hell, and
consequently the charge of keeping Satan _in_, to the beings in the
universe most interested in letting him _out_. The sole but sufficient
excuse is that these faults are inherent in the subject. If Milton had
not thought that he could justify the ways of Jehovah to man he would
not have written at all; common sense on the part of the angels would
have paralysed the action of the poem; we should, if conscious of our
loss, have lamented the irrefragable criticism that should have stifled
the magnificent allegory of Sin and Death. Another critical thrust is
equally impossible to parry. It is true that the Evil One is the hero of
the epic. Attempts have been made to invest Adam with this character. He
is, indeed, a great figure to contemplate, and such as might represent
the ideal of humanity till summoned to act and suffer. When, indeed, he
partakes of the forbidden fruit in disobedience to his Maker, but in
compassion to his mate, he does seem for a moment to fulfil the canon
which decrees that the hero shall not always be faultless, but always
shall be noble. The moment, however, that he begins to wrangle with Eve
about their respective shares of blame, he forfeits his estate of
heroism more irretrievably than his estate of holiness--a fact of which
Milton cannot have been unaware, but he had no liberty to forsake the
Scripture narrative. Satan remains, therefore, the only possible hero,
and it is one of the inevitable blemishes of the poem that he should
disappear almost entirely from the latter books.
These defects, and many more which might be adduced, are abundantly
compensated by the poet's vital relation to the religion of his age. No
poet whose fame is co-extensive with the civilised world, except
Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever been greatly in advance of his times.
Had Milton been so, he might have avoided many faults, but he would not
have been a representative poet; nor could Shelley have classed him with
Homer and Dante, and above Virgil, as "the third epic poet; that is, the
third poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible
relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which
he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in
correspondence with their development." Hence it is that in the
"Adonais," Shelley calls Milton "the third among the sons of light."
A clear conception of the universe as Milton's inner eye beheld it, and
of his religious and philosophical opinions in so far as they appear in
the poem, is indispensable for a correct understanding of "Paradise
Lost." The best service to be rendered to the reader within such limits
as ours is to direct him to Professor Masson's discussion of Milton's
cosmology in his "Life of Milton," and also in his edition of the
Poetical Works. Generally speaking, it may be said that Milton's
conception of the universe is Ptolemaic, that for him sun and moon and
planets revolve around the central earth, rapt by the revolution of the
crystal spheres in which, sphere enveloping sphere, they are
successively located. But the light which had broken in upon him from
the discoveries of Galileo has led him to introduce features not
irreconcilable with the solar centre and ethereal infinity of
Copernicus; so that "the poet would expect the effective permanence of
his work in the imagination of the world, whether Ptolemy or Copernicus
should prevail." So Professor Masson, who finely and justly adds that
Milton's blindness helped him "by having already converted all external
space in his own sensations into an infinite of circumambient blackness
through which he could flash brilliance at his pleasure." His
inclination as a thinker is evidently towards the Copernican theory, but
he saw that the Ptolemaic, however inferior in sublimity, was better
adapted to the purpose of a poem requiring a definite theatre of action.
For rapturous contemplation of the glory of God in nature, the
Copernican system is immeasurably the more stimulating to the spirit,
but when made the theatre of an action the universe fatigues with its
infinitude--
"Millions have meaning; after this
Cyphers forget the integer."
An infinite sidereal universe would have stultified the noble
description how Satan--
"In the emptier waste, resembling air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat;
And fast by, hanging in a golden chain,
This pendant world, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon."
This pendant world, observe, is not the earth, as Addison understood it,
but the entire sidereal universe, depicted not as the infinity we now
know it to be, but as a definite object, so insulated in the vastness of
space as to be perceptible to the distant Fiend as a minute star, and no
larger in comparison with the courts of Heaven--themselves not wholly
seen--than such a twinkler matched with the full-orbed moon. Such a
representation, if it diminishes the grandeur of the universe accessible
to sense, exalts that of the supersensual and extramundane regions where
the action takes its birth, and where Milton's gigantic imagination is
most perfectly at home.
There is no such compromise between religious creeds in Milton's mind as
he saw good to make between Ptolemy and Copernicus. The matter was, in
his estimation, far too serious. Never was there a more unaccountable
misstatement than Ruskin's, that "Paradise Lost" is a poem in which
every artifice of invention is consciously employed--not a single fact
being conceived as tenable by any living faith. Milton undoubtedly
believed most fully in the actual existence of all his chief personages,
natural and supernatural, and was sure that, however he might have
indulged his imagination in the invention of incidents, he had
represented character with the fidelity of a conscientious historian.
His religious views, moreover, are such as he could never have thought
it right to publish if he had not been intimately convinced of their
truth. He has strayed far from the creed of Puritanism. He is an Arian;
his Son of God, though an unspeakably exalted being, is dependent,
inferior, not self-existent, and could be merged in the Father's person
or obliterated entirely without the least diminution of Almighty
perfection. He is, moreover, no longer a Calvinist: Satan and Adam both
possess free will, and neither need have fallen. The reader must accept
these views, as well as Milton's conception of the materiality of the
spiritual world, if he is to read to good purpose. "If his imagination,"
says Pattison, pithily, "is not active enough to assist the poet, he
must at least not resist him."
This is excellent advice as respects the general plan of "Paradise
Lost," the materiality of its spiritual personages, and its system of
philosophy and theology. Its poetical beauties can only be resisted
where they are not perceived. They have repeated the miracles of Orpheus
and Amphion, metamorphosing one most bitterly obnoxious, of whom so late
as 1687 a royalist wrote that "his fame is gone out like a candle in a
snuff, and his memory will always stink," into an object of universal
veneration. From the first instant of perusal the imagination is led in
captivity, and for the first four books at least stroke upon stroke of
sublimity follows with such continuous and undeviating regularity that
sublimity seems this Creation's first law, and we feel like pigmies
transported to a world of giants. There is nothing forced or affected
in this grandeur, no visible effort, no barbaric profusion, everything
proceeds with a severe and majestic order, controlled by the strength
that called it into being. The similes and other poetical ornaments,
though inexpressibly magnificent, seem no more so than the greatness of
the general conception demands. Grant that Satan in his fall is not
"less than archangel ruined," and it is no exaggeration but the simplest
truth to depict his mien--
"As when the sun, new risen,
Looks through the horizontal misty air,
Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations."
When such a being voyages through space it is no hyperbole to compare
him to a whole fleet, judiciously shown at such distance as to suppress
every minute detail that could diminish the grandeur of the image--
"As when far off at sea a fleet descried
Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring
Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood,
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape,
Ply stemming nightly towards the pole: so seemed
Far off the flying Fiend."
These similes, and an infinity of others, are grander than anything in
Homer, who would, however, have equalled them with an equal subject.
Dante's treatment is altogether different; the microscopic intensity of
perception in which he so far surpasses Homer and Milton affords, in
our opinion, no adequate compensation for his inferiority in
magnificence. That the theme of "Paradise Lost" should have evoked such
grandeur is a sufficient compensation for its incurable flaws and the
utter breakdown of its ostensible moral purpose. There is yet another
department of the poem where Milton writes as he could have written on
nothing else. The elements of his under-world are comparatively simple,
fire and darkness, fallen angels now huddled thick as leaves in
Vallombrosa; anon,
"A forest huge of spears and thronging helms,"
charming their painful steps over the burning marl by
"The Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders;"
the dazzling magnificence of Pandemonium; the ineffable welter of Chaos;
proudly eminent over all like a tower, the colossal personality of
Satan. The description of Paradise and the story of Creation, if making
less demand on the poet's creative power, required greater resources of
knowledge, and more consummate skill in combination. Nature must yield
up her treasures, whatever of fair and stately the animal and vegetable
kingdoms can afford must be brought together, blended in gorgeous masses
or marshalled in infinite procession. Here Milton is as profuse as he
has hitherto been severe, and with good cause; it is possible to make
Hell too repulsive for art, it is not possible to make Eden too
enchanting. In his descriptions of the former the effect is produced by
a perpetual succession of isolated images of awful majesty; in his
Paradise and Creation the universal landscape is bathed in a general
atmosphere of lustrous splendour. This portion of his work is
accordingly less great in detached passages, but is little inferior in
general greatness. No less an authority than Tennyson, indeed, expresses
a preference for the "bowery loneliness" of Eden over the "Titan angels"
of the "deep-domed Empyrean." If this only means that Milton's Eden is
finer than his war in heaven, we must concur; but if a wider application
be intended, it does seem to us that his Pandemonium exalts him to a
greater height above every other poet than his Paradise exalts him above
his predecessor, and in some measure, his exemplar, Spenser.
To remain at such an elevation was impossible. Milton compares
unfavourably with Homer in this; his epic begins at its zenith, and
after a while visibly and continually declines. His genius is
unimpaired, but his skill transcends his stuff. The fall of man and its
consequences could not by any device be made as interesting as the fall
of Satan, of which it is itself but a consequence. It was, moreover,
absolutely inevitable that Adam's fall, the proper catastrophe of the
poem, should occur some time before the conclusion, otherwise there
would have been no space for the unfolding of the scheme of Redemption,
equally essential from the point of view of orthodoxy and of art. The
effect is the same as in the case of Shakespeare's "Julius Cæsar,"
which, having proceeded with matchless vigour up to the flight of the
conspirators after Antony's speech, becomes comparatively tame and
languid, and cannot be revived even by such a masterpiece as the
contention between Brutus and Cassius. It is to be regretted that
Milton's extreme devotion to the letter of Scripture has not permitted
him to enrich his latter books with any corresponding episode. It is not
until the very end that he is again truly himself--
"They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand; the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon.
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."
Some minor objections may be briefly noticed. The materiality of
Milton's celestial warfare has been censured by every one from the days
of Sir Samuel Morland,[6] a splenetic critic, who had incurred Milton's
contempt by his treachery to Cromwell and Thurloe. Warfare, however,
there must be: war cannot be made without weapons; and Milton's only
fault is that he has rather exaggerated than minimized the difficulties
of his subject. A sense of humour would have spiked his celestial
artillery, but a lively perception of the ridiculous is scarcely to be
demanded from a Milton. After all, he was borrowing from good poets,[7]
whose thought in itself is correct, and even profound; it is only when
artillery antedates humanity that the ascription of its invention to the
Tempter seems out of place. The metamorphosis of the demons into
serpents has been censured as grotesque; but it was imperatively
necessary to manifest by some unmistakable outward sign that victory did
not after all remain with Satan, and the critics may be challenged to
find one more appropriate. The bridge built by Sin and Death is equally
essential. Satan's progeny must not be dismissed without some exploit
worthy of their parentage. The one passage where Milton's taste seems to
us entirely at fault is the description of the Paradise of Fools (iii.,
481-497), where his scorn of--
"Reliques, beads,
Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,"
has tempted him to chequer the sublime with the ludicrous.
No subject but a Biblical one would have insured Milton universal
popularity among his countrymen, for his style is that of an ancient
classic transplanted, like Aladdin's palace set down with all its
magnificence in the heart of Africa; and his diction, the delight of the
educated, is the despair of the ignorant man. Not that this diction is
in any respect affected or pedantic. Milton was the darling poet of our
greatest modern master of unadorned Saxon speech, John Bright. But it
is freighted with classic allusion--not alone from the ancient
classics--and comes to us rich with gathered sweets, like a wind laden
with the scent of many flowers. "It is," says Pattison, "the elaborated
outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry--the language of
one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of past
time." "Words," the same writer reminds us, "over and above their
dictionary signification, connote all the feeling which has gathered
round them by reason of their employment through a hundred generations
of song." So it is, every word seems instinct with its own peculiar
beauty, and fraught with its own peculiar association, and yet each
detail is strictly subordinate to the general effect. No poet of
Milton's rank, probably, has been equally indebted to his predecessors,
not only for his vocabulary, but for his thoughts. Reminiscences throng
upon him, and he takes all that comes, knowing that he can make it
lawfully his own. The comparison of Satan's shield to the moon, for
instance, is borrowed from the similar comparison of the shield of
Achilles in the Iliad, but what goes in Homer comes out Milton. Homer
merely says that the huge and massy shield emitted a lustre like that of
the moon in heaven. Milton heightens the resemblance by giving the
shield shape, calls in the telescope to endow it with what would seem
preternatural dimensions to the naked eye, and enlarges even these by
the suggestion of more than the telescope can disclose--
"His ponderous shield,
Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening, from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe."
Thus does Milton appropriate the wealth of past literature, secure of
being able to recoin it with his own image and superscription. The
accumulated learning which might have choked the native fire of a
feebler spirit was but nourishment to his. The polished stones and
shining jewels of his superb mosaic are often borrowed, but its plan and
pattern are his own.
One of the greatest charms of "Paradise Lost" is the incomparable metre,
which, after Coleridge and Tennyson have done their utmost, remains
without equal in our language for the combination of majesty and music.
It is true that this majesty is to a certain extent inherent in the
subject, and that the poet who could rival it would scarcely be well
advised to exert his power to the full unless his theme also rivalled
the magnificence of Milton's. Milton, on his part, would have been quite
content to have written such blank verse as Wordsworth's "Yew Trees," or
as the exordium of "Alastor," or as most of Coleridge's idylls, had his
subject been less than epical. The organ-like solemnity of his verbal
music is obtained partly by extreme attention to variety of pause, but
chiefly, as Wordsworth told Klopstock, and as Mr. Addington Symonds
points out more at length, by the period, not the individual line, being
made the metrical unit, "so that each line in a period shall carry its
proper burden of sound, but the burden shall be differently distributed
in the successive verses." Hence lines which taken singly seem almost
unmetrical, in combination with their associates appear indispensable
parts of the general harmony. Mr. Symonds gives some striking instances.
Milton's versification is that of a learned poet, profound in thought
and burdened with the further care of ordering his thoughts: it is
therefore only suited to sublimity of a solemn or meditative cast, and
most unsuitable to render the unstudied sublimity of Homer. Perhaps no
passage is better adapted to display its dignity, complicated artifice,
perpetual retarding movement, concerted harmony, and grave but ravishing
sweetness than the description of the coming on of Night in the Fourth
Book:--
"Now came still evening on, and twilight grey
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus that led
The stary host rose brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw."
How exquisite the indication of the pauseless continuity of the
nightingale's song by the transition from short sentences, cut up by
commas and semicolons, to the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of "She
all night long her amorous descant sung"! The poem is full of similar
felicities, none perhaps more noteworthy than the sequence of
monosyllables that paints the enormous bulk of the prostrate Satan:--
"So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay."
It is a most interesting subject for inquiry from what sources, other
than the Scriptures, Milton drew aid in the composition of "Paradise
Lost." The most striking counterpart is Calderon, to whom he owed as
little as Calderon can have owed to him. "El Magico Prodigioso," already
cited as affording a remarkable parallel to "Comus," though performed in
1637, was not printed until 1663, when "Paradise Lost" was already
completed.[8] The two great religious poets have naturally conceived the
Evil One much in the same manner, and Calderon's Lucifer,
"Like the red outline of beginning Adam,"
might well have passed as the original draft of Milton's Satan:--
"In myself I am
A world of happiness and misery;
This I have lost, and that I must lament
For ever. In my attributes I stood
So high and so heroically great,
In lineage so supreme, and with a genius
Which penetrated with a glance the world
Beneath my feet, that, won by my high merit,
A King--whom I may call the King of Kings,
Because all others tremble in their pride
Before the terrors of his countenance--
In his high palace, roofed with brightest gems
Of living light--call them the stars of heaven--
Named me his counsellor. But the high praise
Stung me with pride and envy, and I rose
In mighty competition, to ascend
His seat, and place my foot triumphantly
Upon his subject thrones. Chastised, I know
The depth to which ambition falls. For mad
Was the attempt; and yet more mad were now
Repentance of the irrevocable deed.
Therefore I chose this ruin with the glory
Of not to be subdued, before the shame
Of reconciling me with him who reigns
By coward cession. Nor was I alone,
Nor am I now, nor shall I be, alone.
And there was hope, and there may still be hope;
For many suffrages among his vassals
Hailed me their lord and king, and many still
Are mine, and many more perchance shall be."
A striking proof that resemblance does not necessarily imply plagiarism.
Milton's affinity to Calderon has been overlooked by his commentators;
but four luminaries have been named from which he is alleged to have
drawn, however sparingly, in his golden urn--Caedmon, the Adamus Exul of
Grotius, the Adamo of the Italian dramatist Andreini, and the Lucifer of
the Dutch poet Vondel. Caedmon, first printed in 1655, it is but barely
possible that he should have known, and ere he could have known him the
conception of "Paradise Lost" was firmly implanted in his mind. External
evidence proves his acquaintance with Grotius, internal evidence his
knowledge of Andreini: and small as are his direct obligations to the
Italian drama, we can easily believe with Hayley that "his fancy caught
fire from that spirited, though irregular and fantastic composition."
Vondel's Lucifer--whose subject is not the fall of Adam, but the fall of
Satan--was acted and published in 1654, when Milton is known to have
been studying Dutch, but when the plan of "Paradise Lost" must have been
substantially formed. There can, nevertheless, be no question of the
frequent verbal correspondences, not merely between Vondel's Lucifer and
"Paradise Lost," but between his Samson and "Samson Agonistes." Milton's
indebtedness, so long ago as 1829, attracted the attention of an English
poet of genius, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who pointed out that his
lightning-speech, "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven," was a
thunderbolt condensed from a brace of Vondel's clumsy Alexandrines,
which Beddoes renders thus:--
"And rather the first prince at an inferior court
Than in the blessed light the second or still less."
Mr. Gosse followed up the inquiry, which eventually became the subject
of a monograph by Mr. George Edmundson ("Milton and Vondel," 1885). That
Milton should have had, as he must have had, Vondel's works translated
aloud to him, is a most interesting proof, alike of his ardour in the
enrichment of his own mind, and of his esteem for the Dutch poet.
Although, however, his obligations to predecessors are not to be
overlooked, they are in general only for the most obvious ideas and
expressions, lying right in the path of any poet treating the subject.
_Je l'aurais bien pris sans toi._ When, as in the instance above quoted,
he borrows anything more recondite, he so exalts and transforms it that
it passes from the original author to him like an angel the former has
entertained unawares. This may not entirely apply to the Italian
reformer, Bernardino Ochino, to whom, rather than to Tasso, Milton seems
indebted for the conception of his diabolical council. Ochino, in many
respects a kindred spirit to Milton, must have been well known to him as
the first who had dared to ventilate the perilous question of the
lawfulness of polygamy. In Ochino's "Divine Tragedy," which he may have
read either in the Latin original or in the nervous translation of
Bishop Poynet, Milton would find a hint for his infernal senate. "The
introduction to the first dialogue," says Ochino's biographer Benrath,
"is highly dramatic, and reminds us of Job and Faust." Ochino's
arch-fiend, like Milton's, announces a masterstroke of genius. "God sent
His Son into the world, and I will send my son." Antichrist accordingly
comes to light in the shape of the Pope, and works infinite havoc until
Henry VIII. is divinely commissioned for his discomfiture. It is a
token, not only of Milton's, but of Vondel's, indebtedness, that, with
Ochino as with them, Beelzebub holds the second place in the council,
and even admonishes his leader. "I fear me," he remarks, "lest when
Antichrist shall die, and come down hither to hell, that as he passeth
us in wickedness, so he will be above us in dignity." Prescience worthy
of him who
"In his rising seemed
A pillar of state; deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone."
Milton's borrowings, nevertheless, nowise impair his greatness. The
obligation is rather theirs, of whose stores he has condescended to
avail himself. He may be compared to his native country, which, fertile
originally in little but enterprise, has made the riches of the earth
her own. He has given her a national epic, inferior to no other, and
unlike most others, founded on no merely local circumstance, but such as
must find access to every nation acquainted with the most
widely-circulated Book in the world. He has further enriched his native
literature with an imperishable monument of majestic diction, an example
potent to counteract that wasting agency of familiar usage by which
language is reduced to vulgarity, as sea-water wears cliffs to shingle.
He has reconciled, as no other poet has ever done, the Hellenic spirit
with the Hebraic, the Bible with the Renaissance. And, finally, as we
began by saying, his poem is the mighty bridge--
"Bound with Gorgonian rigour not to move,"
across which the spirit of ancient poetry has travelled to modern times,
and by which the continuity of great English literature has remained
unbroken.