y of action, than the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. This was probably
unavoidable but it was probably also Milton's deliberate intention. It
was not his nature to care much about the small doings of ordinary
people in everyday life. The line which he most often repeats in
_Paradise Lost_ is the very opposite of those which are repeated so
often in the _Iliad_, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, just
doing their plain duty of linking two speeches or two paragraphs
together: such as--

_hos oi men toiauta pros allelous agoreuon_

What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the other hand, one of his
stateliest lines, the magnificent--

"Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."

The choice is characteristic of the man. His "natural port," as
Johnson well said, "is gigantic loftiness," and his end to "raise the
thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures." So it may well be that
this disadvantage of his subject did not weigh with him as much as it
would have done with most poets. But he was not altogether blind to
it, and the amazing skill he shows in partly getting over it is the
other half of the answer to {163} the question asked just now. His
action up to the moment of the Fall is the inhuman one of a few days in
hell, heaven, and a small sinless spot of earth: and the Fall does not
increase the number of actors. Yet into the mouths of this tiny group
of persons Milton may be said to have brought all the history of the
world and all its geography, art, science and learning, the Jew, the
Christian and the Pagan, Greek philosophy and Roman politics, classical
myth, mediaeval romance, and even the contemporary life of his own
experience. This is partly done, as Virgil had done it, by the way of
a prophecy of future ages: but to a much greater extent by the way of
similes which are more elaborate and learned in Milton than in any
poet. By their assistance he gives rest to the imagination exhausted
by the sublimity of heaven and hell, bringing it home to its own
familiar earth, to scenes whose charm, unlike that of Eden or
Pandemonium, lies not, in the wonder their strangeness excites but in
the old habits, experiences and memories which they recall. So, after
the strain of the great debate with which the second book opens, he
soothes us with the beautiful simile of the evening after storm--

"Thus they their doubtful consultations dark
Ended, rejoicing in their matchless Chief;
{164}
As, whe