no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
{175}
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?"

Here we obviously go outside the dramatic probabilities: it is no
longer Belial who is speaking: it is the voice of a highly cultivated
and intellectual human being with all Greek thought behind him; it is,
in short, Milton himself. The whole poem is full of such
autobiographical confessional passages, either indirect like this or
open and undisguised like the great introductions to the first, third,
seventh and ninth books. This constant intervention of the poet in his
epic is one of the originalities of _Paradise Lost_, and certainly not
the least successful. The passages which are due to it have been
criticized as irregularities or superfluities, but, as Johnson justly
asked, "superfluities so beautiful who would take away?" Homer may be
said never to allow us to do more than guess obscurely at what he
himself was or thought or felt: so leaving room for the follies of the
criticism which supposes him to be a kind of limited company of poets.
Virgil spoke directly to his readers at least once in the _Aeneid_, in
the most magnificent, and {176} most magnificently fulfilled, of all
the poetic promises of eternal fame--

"Fortunati ambo! Si quid mea carmina possunt
Nulla dies unquam memori vos eximet aevo
Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."

But it is less in such a direct intervention as this than in the whole
tone and temper of his poem that he reveals to us his delicate and
beautiful nature. Milton confesses himself in both ways. His high
seriousness, his proud and resolute will, his grave sadness at the
folly of mankind, are interwoven in the whole of his story. Then in
the speeches he will often, as in this of Belial, forget altogether who
is speaking and where and when, forget Satan and Adam, Eden and Hell,
and make his human escape to his own time and country and to himself.
The extreme limitations of his subject made something of this kind
almost necessary. When all had been done that simile and prophecy
could do to bring in the life of men and women as Milton's readers knew
it there still remained the difficulty that Adam and his angel visitors
must talk, and that before the Fall there was al