ds supreme counsel only with his own breast.
An outcast from Heaven, Hell trembles beneath his feet, Sin and Death are
at his heels, and mankind are his easy prey.

"All is not lost; th' unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what else is not to be overcome,"

are still his. The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude of
it; the fierceness of tormenting flames, is qualified and made innoxious
by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite happiness to
himself is compensated in thought, by the power of inflicting infinite
misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the
abstract love of evil--but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of
self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil,
and even his own, are subordinate. From this principle he never once
flinches. His love of power and contempt for suffering are never once
relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity. His thoughts burn like a hell
within him; but the power of thought holds dominion in his mind over every
other consideration. The consciousness of a determined purpose, of "that
intellectual being, those thoughts that wander through eternity," though
accompanied with endless pain, he prefers to nonentity, to "being
swallowed up and lost in the wide womb of uncreated night." He expresses
the sum and substance of all ambition in one line: "Fallen cherub, to be
weak is miserable, doing or suffering!" After such a conflict as his, and
such a defeat, to retreat in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at
all, is something; but he does more than this--he founds a new empire in
hell, and from it conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted
flight, forcing his way through nether and surrounding fires. The poet has
not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to
the magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more
distinct; the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock
was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the
figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, "rising aloft
incumbent on the dusky air," it is illustrated with the most striking and
appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic,
irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed--but dazzling in its faded
splendour, the clouded ruins of a god. T