ades before him danced,
Shedding sweet influence. Less bright the Moon,
But opposite in levelled west was set
His mirror, with full face borrowing her light
From him; for other light she needed none
In that aspect, and still that distance keeps
Till night; then in the east her turn she shines,
Revolved on Heaven's great axle, and her reign
With thousand lesser lights dividual holds,
With thousand thousand stars that then appeared
Spangling the hemisphere. Then first adorned
With their bright luminaries, that set and rose,
Glad evening and glad morn crowned the fourth day.--vii. 339-86.

The first creation was Light, and Milton, according to Scriptural
testimony, ascribes its origin to the bidding of the Creator. 'God said,
Let there be light; and there was light!' The Sun he describes as a
mighty sphere, but at first non-luminous. There was light, but no sun.
The reason usually given in explanation of this phenomenon is, that the
heavenly bodies were created at the same time as the Earth, but were
rendered invisible by a canopy of vapour and cloud which enveloped the
newly-formed globe; and that afterwards, when it dispersed, they
appeared in the firmament, shining in all their pristine splendour.
Milton does not, however, adhere to this view of things, but says that
light for the first three days sojourned in a cloudy shrine or
tabernacle, and was afterwards transplanted in the Sun, which became a
great palace of light.

He expresses himself in a somewhat similar manner in Book III., which
opens with an address to Light--one of the most beautiful passages in
the poem, in which he alludes to his blindness when expressing his
thoughts and sentiments with regard to this ethereal medium, which
conveys to us the pleasurable sensation of vision--

Hail, holy Light! offspring of Heaven first-born!
Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam,
May I express thee unblamed? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity--dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!
Or hear'st thou rather, pure Ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the Sun,
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless Infinite.--iii. 1-12.

The Sun having become a lucent orb, Milton poetically