Milton's verse. The stern idealism of Geneva is clothed in
the gorgeous robes of the Renascence. If we miss something of the free
play of Spenser's fancy, and yet more of the imaginative delight in
their own creations which gives so exquisite a life to the poetry of the
early dramatists, we find in place of these the noblest example which
our literature affords of the majesty of classic form.

[Sidenote: The Epic of Puritanism.]

But it is not with the literary value of the "Paradise Lost" that we are
here concerned. Its historic importance lies in this, that it is the
Epic of Puritanism. Its scheme is the problem with which the Puritan
wrestled in hours of gloom and darkness--the problem of sin and
redemption, of the world-wide struggle of evil against good. The intense
moral concentration of the Puritan had given an almost bodily shape to
spiritual abstractions before Milton gave life and being to the forms of
Sin and Death. It was the Puritan tendency to mass into one vast "body
of sin" the various forms of human evil, and by the very force of a
passionate hatred to exaggerate their magnitude and their power, to
which we owe the conception of Milton's Satan. The greatness of the
Puritan aim in the long and wavering struggle for justice and law and a
higher good, the grandeur of character which the contest developed, the
colossal forms of good and evil which moved over its stage, the debates
and conspiracies and battles which had been men's life for twenty years,
the mighty eloquence and the mightier ambition which the war had roused
into being--all left their mark on the "Paradise Lost." Whatever was
highest and best in the Puritan temper spoke in the nobleness and
elevation of the poem, in its purity of tone, in its loftiness of
conception, in its ordered and equable realization of a great purpose.
Even in his boldest flights Milton is calm and master of himself. His
touch is always sure. Whether he passes from Heaven to Hell or from the
council hall of Satan to the sweet conference of Adam and Eve his tread
is steady and unfaltering.

[Sidenote: Its defects.]

But if the poem expresses the higher qualities of the Puritan temper it
expresses no less exactly its defects. Throughout it we feel almost
painfully a want of the finer and subtler sympathies, of a large and
genial humanity, of a sense of spiritual mystery. Dealing as Milton does
with subjects the most awful and mysterious that poet ever chose, he is
nev