ful nightingale.
She all night long her amorous descant sung:
Silence was pleased. Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode 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.

So also Milton's Almighty, considered purely as a literary character, is
unfortunately tinged with the narrow and literal theology of the time. He
is a being enormously egotistic, the despot rather than the servant of the
universe, seated upon a throne with a chorus of angels about him eternally
singing his praises and ministering to a kind of divine vanity. It is not
necessary to search heaven for such a character; the type is too common
upon earth. But in Satan Milton breaks away from crude mediaeval
conceptions; he follows the dream again, and gives us a character to admire
and understand:

"Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,"
Said then the lost Archangel, "this the seat
That we must change for Heaven?--this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since He
Who now is sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: farthest from Him is best,
Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal World! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor--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,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

In this magnificent heroism Milton has unconsciously immortalized the
Puritan spirit, the same unconquerable spirit that set men to writing poems
and allegories when in prison for the faith, and that sent them over the
stormy sea in a cockleshell to found a free commonwealth in the wilds of
America.

For a modern reader the understanding of _Paradise Lost_ presupposes two
things,--a knowledge of the first chapters o