ate classical
comparisons of Antaeus and the Sphinx, and the triumphal chorus of Angels
who bear the Son of God aloft with anthems of victory--the poem ends with
the same exquisite lull:--

He, unobserved,
Home to his mother's house private returned.

And _Samson Agonistes_ brings as glorious a triumph to no less peaceful a
close:--

And calm of mind, all passion spent.

The dying fall is the same in all three, and is the form of ending
preferred by the musical and poetic genius of Milton.

Passages of a crowded and ostentatious magnificence are more frequent in
_Paradise Lost_ than in either of the two later poems. In _Paradise
Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_ the enhanced severity of a style which
rejects almost all ornament was due in part, no doubt, to a gradual
change in Milton's temper and attitude. It is not so much that his power
of imagination waned, as that his interest veered, turning more to
thought and reflection, less to action and picture. In these two poems,
at the last, he celebrated that

better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom

which he had professed to sing in _Paradise Lost_. We are told by his
nephew that he "could not bear with patience any such thing related to
him" as that _Paradise Regained_ was inferior to _Paradise Lost_. He was
right; its merits and beauties are of a different and more sombre kind,
yet of a kind perhaps further out of the reach of any other poet than
even the constellated glories of _Paradise Lost_ itself. It should be
remembered that _Paradise Lost_, although it was written by Milton
between the fiftieth and the fifty-seventh years of his age, was
conceived by him, in its main outlines, not later than his thirty-fourth
year. Two of the passages noticed above, where Satan addresses himself to
the Sun and where the Angel leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise, embody
situations which had appealed to his younger imagination. Some of the
very words of Satan's address were written, we learn from Phillips, about
1642. And the expulsion of Adam and Eve seems to contain a reminiscence
of the time when Milton was considering the history of Lot as a possible
subject for an epic. The lines--

In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents--

were perhaps suggested by the Scripture narrative--"And while he
lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon the hand of his
wife,... and they brought him fort