tains no more intricately beautiful passage
than this. It is one of those things that have been the delight and
despair of poets ever since. For all his disdain of the follies of the
Middle Age Milton can never touch the old romances, as Joseph Warton
well noted, without immediately rising into the most exquisite poetry:
and this reluctant homage of classical genius is the greatest tribute
ever paid to their undying fascination.

But of course such a passage as this is not typical of the poem: it is
one of its far-shining heights which cannot be altogether missed even
by eyes quite blind to the beauties of the lower country through which
_Paradise Regained_ takes the most part of its course. Ordinarily the
poem is grave, plain and unadorned, engaged in the discussion of moral
problems which give little opportunity for the more obvious graces of
poetry. The interest of the speeches which constitute the bulk of it
is threefold: technical, in the rhythmical or metrical skill by which
Milton sustains an {215} abstract discourse expressed in unadorned
language and keeps it at the level of high poetry; moral or
intellectual, the interest of the subjects discussed; and, the greatest
of all for many readers, autobiographical, the interest of the evidence
they afford of the poet's own thoughts and character. All may be seen,
for instance, in such a confession as that of Satan in the first book--

"Envy, they say, excites me, thus to gain
Companions of my misery and woe!
At first it may be; but, long since with woe
Nearer acquainted, now I feel by proof
That fellowship in pain divides not smart,
Nor lightens aught each man's peculiar load."

There is scarcely a word in it that prose cannot use even to-day. The
thought is one that might come from any moralist; there is nothing
daring or imaginative about it. Yet out of this what poetry Milton has
made! The personal emotion of it, the note of confession and
individual experience, has lifted it altogether above the level of the
cold maxims of the preacher who gives no sign of having suffered, or
sinned, or so much as lived, himself. Then the art of it: so entirely
unperceived by the ordinary reader, so invincible in its effect upon
him. The whole secret of it defies analysis: but a few ingredients can
{216} be detected. There is comparatively little of Milton's favourite
alliteration: the tone of the passage is too quiet for the free use of
an artistic dev