n like bubbles. There is concerted song, feasting, and
gratulation; dire plots are hatched and blaze forth into light; will
clashes with will; Heaven opens, and a torrent of flaming ruin is poured
forth into the deep. The Victor, ensconced in his omnipotence, is
fiercely triumphant; and in the dark below there is the dull gleam of
unconquered pride, deadly courage, and immortal despair. But in the midst
of all this vast rivalry of interests and jar of opposed systems, a cry
is heard, like that muffled cry which caught Macbeth's ear as he nerved
himself for his last fight. It is the cry of the human soul, left
homeless and derelict in a universe where she is the only alien. For her
the amaranth of the empyreal Heaven is as comfortless as the adamant of
Hell. She has lost her Paradise even while Adam's was building--the
Paradise where the flowers fade, and loves and hates are mortal.

In the poem itself signs are not wanting that Milton felt the terrible
strain imposed upon him by the intense and prolonged abstraction of his
theme--its unreality and superhuman elevation. Some of the comparisons
that he chooses to illustrate scenes in Hell are taken from the incidents
of simple rustic life, and by their contrast with the lurid creatures of
his imagination come like a draught of cold water to a traveller in a
tropical waste of sand and thorns. It is almost as if the poet himself
were oppressed by the suffocation of the atmosphere that he has created,
and, gasping for breath, sought relief by summoning up to remembrance the
sweet security of pastoral life. So, when the devils are shrunk to enter
Pandemonium, they are compared to

Faery elves
Whose midnight revels, by a forest-side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees, while overhead the Moon
Sits arbitress, and nearer to the Earth
Wheels her pale course.

The rejoicings, again, at the end of the infernal consultation, are
described in a figure that makes a like impression, and brings the same
momentary relief--

As, when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds
Ascending, while the North-wind sleeps, o'erspread
Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element
Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow or shower,
If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
Extend his evening beam, the fields revive,
The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds
Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings.

The splendid