the Paradise Lost, the Paradise Regained, and the Samson Agonistes, which he intended more especially as his bequest to the literature of England.

Of the style and texture of Milton's earlier poems we have already spoken. They are characterized, in a remarkable degree, we have said, by those peculiar qualities which distinguish, in an intimate and essential manner, the compositions of the poet, as such, from the compositions of the man of thought or the man of mere persuasive utter ance-extreme sweetness and musical charm of expression; delight in sensuous imagery; absolute or almost absolute indifference to what is known, usual, rational, or real; and a kind of holiday leisureliness of motion through and amid the labyrinths of occult and luxuriant allusion. These poems are like the precious gum of certain forest trees, small and exquisite in production rather than impressive by reason of intellectual quantity; and yet they are the gum precisely of one of these great forest trees, elaborated out of its whole substance, leaf, trunk, bark, and root. There are millions of conceivable pieces of writing, for example, any one of which would, as an effort of general intellectual power, be more notable and difficult than the following passage from the Penseroso; and yet the most intellectual man in the world, not being a poet, or not being exactly such a poet as Milton, would have toiled in vain to write it :

"But, O sad Virgin, that thy power
Might raise Musæus from his bower,
Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing
Such notes, as, warbled to the string,
Drew iron tears from Pluto's cheek,
And made hell grant what love did seek:
Or call up him that left half told
The story of Cambuscan bold,
Of Camball, and of Algarsife,
And who had Canace to wife,

That owned the virtuous ring and glass;
And of the wondrous horse of brass,
On which the Tartar King did ride;
And if aught else great bards beside
To sage and solemn tunes have sung,
Of tourneys and of trophies hung,
Of forests and enchantments drear,
Where more is meant than meets the ear.
Thus, Night, oft see me in thy pale career,
Till civil-suited morn appear,
Not tricked and frounced as she was wont
With the Attic boy to hunt,
But kerchieft in a comely cloud
While rocking winds are piping loud,
Or ushered with a shower still,
When the gust hath blown his fill,

Ending on the rustling leaves

With minute drops from off the eaves!"

Such was the earlier Miltonic muse; the muse of rich and sensuous fancy, shunning the human world, placid even in its melancholy, and rarely or never perturbed by the intrusion of the social passions.

The first and most important exercise of an artist's invention, Goethe has well said, is in his choice of a subject. Very much of all that the artist is or can do is involved and indicated in this. Sometimes the choice of a subject is apparently a simple act of the judgment, first looking deliberately about for a variety of subjects, and then, after balancing their respective merits, deciding upon one. By some such process Wordsworth, as he himself informs us, decided at last on that meditative and philosophical poem of which the Excursion was an instalment; rejecting in its favor various schemes of a British or Scandinavian epic. Even in such a case, however, both the prior and more extensive search, and the subsequent selection, are determined by a kind of instinct compounded out of all that is peculiar in the poet's character and past experience. And more particularly still is this connection between the actual life of a poet and the nature of his poetical productions made evident in those cases where the poet either, like Goethe, habitually converts striking scenes and incidents in his own biography into subjects and suggestions for his art, or, like Dante, carries about with him for years and years the burthen of one weighty and laborious conception. How Milton chose the subjects of his later poems it is not easy to say with certainty. In the prime of his early manhood, as we have seen, he was in a state of perplexity, similar to that of Wordsworth, as to what species of composition would best suit his genius and best answer his preconceived scheme of an immortal English work. Wavering between the epic, the dramatic, and the lyric, his thoughts on the whole seemed to tend towards an epic to be derived from British history. The subsequent events of his life probably assisted to conclude his doubts and point him decisively to one or two themes. Samson Agonistes, for example, was clearly a direct inspiration of his experience of blindness, aided and confirmed by his fondness for Scriptural subjects in general, and his bitter relish for the opportunity of handling such a secondary character as Delilah. Paradise

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 organblow 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 transcendent 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 understand 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. Hero, 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 favored 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 consequencesuch 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 neighborhood 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. Fivesixths of it treat of transactions done amid the great infinitudes of space while our earth was either non-existent, or recognized 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 labor 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 labors, formed conjointly but the necessary preparation for the composition of his final masterpiece, 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 are of the terrestrial paradise. And this is, to some extent, true. Luscious and rich as are Milton's descriptions of Eden, a comparison of these parts of the Paradise Lost with his earlier poems will show that his recollections of the flowers had faded. The hearse of Lycidas is more beautifully garnished with flowers than the nuptial bower of Eve.