ry by the ear and eye for its sonorous
suggestions, and its processions of vague shapes, love Milton; but when
they come to read it for its matter and sentiment, leave him--in most
cases never to return. The atmosphere of his later poems is that of some
great public institution. Heaven is an Oriental despotism. Hell is a
Secession parliament. In the happy garden itself there is no privacy, no
individualism; it is the focus of the action, the central point of the
attack and the defence; and a great part of the conversation of its
inhabitants turns on the regulations under which they live. They never
forget that they are all mankind, and when their psalm goes up in
grateful adoration to their Creator, it is like the unanimous voice of
all nations and kindreds and people and tongues.

"The plan of _Paradise Lost_" says Johnson, "has this inconvenience, that
it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman
who act and suffer are in a state which no other man and woman can ever
know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds
no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself;
he has, therefore, little natural curiosity and sympathy." Milton, he
goes on to explain, "knew human nature only in the gross, and had never
studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring or
the perplexity of contending passions."

He knew human nature only in the gross. He treated nothing less momentous
than the fortunes of the race. It is precisely from this cause that the
incomparable grandeur of Milton's characters and situations springs. The
conversations that he records are like international parleyings. Eve is
the official Mother of mankind. Adam walks forth to meet the angel, in
ambassadorial dignity, the accredited representative of the human race--

Without more train
Accompanied than with his own complete
Perfections; in himself was all his state,
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes, when their rich retinue long
Of horses led and grooms besmeared with gold
Dazzles the crowd and sets them all agape.

And if the other characters of _Paradise Lost_ have this generic stamp,
it is because the chief character of all has it--the character of the
poet himself. It lends a strange dignity to the story of Milton's life
that in all his doings he felt himself to be a "cause," an agent of
mighty purposes. This it is tha