. But he was also debarred from dealing freely in realism; from
carrying conviction by some sudden startling piece of fidelity to the
mixed texture of human experience and human feeling. When the feast is
spread in Eden he remarks, it is true,--"No fear lest dinner cool"; but a
lapse like this is of the rarest. His success--and he knew it--depended
on the untiring maintenance of a superhuman elevation. His choice of
subject had therefore not a little to do with the nature of his diction;
and, through the influence of his diction, as shall be shown hereafter,
with the establishment of the poetic tradition that dominated Eighteenth
Century poetry.

The same motives and tendencies, the same consistent care for remoteness
and loftiness, may be seen in the character of the similes that he most
frequently employs. Almost all his figures and comparisons illustrate
concrete objects by concrete objects, and occurrences in time by other
occurrences later in time. The essentially Romantic sort of figure,
scarcely used by Milton, illustrates subtle conceptual relations by
parable--

Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
And Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,--
Now, if thou would'st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.

Sometimes, by a curious reversal, poets, especially the more
sophisticated poets of the Romantic Revival, describe a perfectly
definite outward object or scene by a figure drawn from the most complex
abstract conceptions. So Shelley, with whom these inverted figures are
habitual, compares the skylark to

A poet hidden
In the light of thought;

and Byron, describing the rainbow over a waterfall, likens it to

Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.

Both ways are foreign to the epic manner of Milton. His figures may be
called historic parallels, whereby the names and incidents of human
history are made to elucidate and ennoble the less familiar names and
incidents of his prehistoric theme. Sometimes, following Homer, he
borrows a figure from rustic life, as where, for instance, he compares
the devils, crowding into Pandemonium, to a swarm of bees. But he
perceived clearly enough that he could not, for the reasons already
explained, afford to deal largely in this class of figure: he prefers to
maintain dignity and distance by choosing comp