vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight."

{186}

Not all the poetry of all the world can produce more than a few
passages that equal this in moving power. Tears are not very far from
the eye that is passing over its page: tears in which sympathy plays a
smaller part than joy at the discovery that human words can be so
beautiful. But if Milton moves us more by his own personality than by
that of any of his creations, it is still true that he is not so
entirely without dramatic power as has sometimes been alleged. No one
would claim for him that he was one of the great narrative or dramatic
masters. But his weakness on these sides is so obvious that there has
been a tendency to exaggerate it. We notice the undramatic speeches of
Satan and Adam: we notice such things as Eve's dream in the fifth book
which, anticipating, as it does, so many of the details of her
temptation, renders her fall much less probable, and goes far to
destroy its interest when it occurs. But we are slower to notice the
admirable dramatic management of such a scene as that between Eve and
the Serpent in the ninth book. And yet how finely imagined it is, in
all its successive stages! Satan, at first "stupidly good," overawed
at Eve's beauty and innocence; then, recovering his natural malice, and
beginning his attempt by appealing to {187} two things, curiosity and
the love of flattery, which have always been supposed especially
powerful with women; and Eve, taking no direct notice of his
compliments and in appearance surrendering only to the other bait of
novelty and surprise; "how cam'st thou speakable of mute?" So the
scene begins. Flattery has ensured the tempter a favourable reception;
curiosity gives him the chance of an apparently telling argument. I
ate, he says, of the fruit of a certain tree and received from it
speech and reason. But I have found nothing to satisfy my new-won
powers till I saw thee, w