brown hair falling as of old over a calm serene
face that still retained much of its youthful beauty, his cheeks
delicately coloured, his clear grey eyes showing no trace of their
blindness. But famous whether for good or ill as his prose writings had
made him, during fifteen years only a few sonnets had broken his silence
as a singer. It was now in his blindness and old age, with the cause he
loved trodden under foot by men as vile as the rabble in "Comus," that
the genius of Milton took refuge in the great poem on which through
years of silence his imagination had been brooding.

[Sidenote: The "Paradise Lost."]

On his return from his travels in Italy Milton spoke of himself as
musing on "a work not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours
of wine, like that which flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar
amourist or the trencher fury of a rhyming parasite, nor to be obtained
by the invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout
prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and
knowledge, and sends out His Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His
altar to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases." His lips were
touched at last. In the quiet retreat of his home in Bunhill Fields he
mused during these years of persecution and loneliness on the "Paradise
Lost." The poem was published in 1667, seven years after the
Restoration, and four years later appeared the "Paradise Regained" and
"Samson Agonistes," in the severe grandeur of whose verse we see the
poet himself "fallen," like Samson, "on evil days and evil tongues, with
darkness and with danger compassed round." But great as the two last
works were their greatness was eclipsed by that of their predecessor.
The whole genius of Milton expressed itself in the "Paradise Lost." The
romance, the gorgeous fancy, the daring imagination which he shared with
the Elizabethan poets, the large but ordered beauty which he had drunk
in from the literature of Greece and Rome, the sublimity of conception,
the loftiness of phrase which he owed to the Bible, blended in this
story "of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden
tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe."
It is only when we review the strangely mingled elements which make up
the poem that we realize the genius which fused them into such a perfect
whole. The meagre outline of the Hebrew legend is lost in the splendour
and music of