by Milton's Satan, and punished by Milton's
God. The stamp of his clear hard imagination is on the whole fabric; and
it is not much harder for us to coax ourselves into the belief that his
is indeed the very world we inhabit than it was for the men of his own
time. The senses and the intellect are older than modern science, and
were employed to good effect before the invention of the spectroscope; it
is they in their daily operation that make it difficult to leap the gulf
which separates the amenities and trivialities of common life from the
solemn theatre of the poet's imagination. The objection that the poem has
lost much of its value because we are compelled to imagine where our
elders believed is of little weight in a case like this, where our lack
of belief is not brought home to us until insuperable difficulties are
placed in the way of our imagination. Where Milton was freest, there we
follow him most gladly; where he wrote in fetters, as notably in some of
the scenes transacted in Heaven, our imagination, not our belief, is the
first to rebel.

We are deceived by names; the more closely _Paradise Lost_ is studied,
the more does the hand of the author appear in every part. The epic poem,
which in its natural form is a kind of cathedral for the ideas of a
nation, is by him transformed into a chapel-of-ease for his own mind, a
monument to his own genius and his own habits of thought. The _Paradise
Lost_ is like the sculptured tombs of the Medici in Florence; it is not
of Night and Morning, nor of Lorenzo and Giuliano, that we think as we
look at them, but solely of the great creator, Michael Angelo. The same
dull convention that calls the _Paradise Lost_ a religious poem might
call these Christian statues. Each is primarily a great work of art in
each the traditions of two eras are blended in a unity that is indicative
of nothing but the character and powers of the artist. The _Paradise
Lost_ is not the less an eternal monument because it is a monument to
dead ideas.

We do not know exactly when Milton made his choice of subject. His Latin
verses addressed to Manso, Marquis of Villa, in January 1638-9, show that
Arthur and the Round Table was at that time the uppermost theme in his
mind, and that the warlike achievement of heroes was the aspect of it
that most attracted him. After his return to England in 1639, it is
mentioned once again in his elegy on Charles Diodati, and then we hear no
more of it. In the tenta