ring lion seeking whom he may devour. He it is who can declare

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be?

MILTON AND DANTE.--It has been usual for the literary critic to compare
Milton and Dante; and it is certain that in the conception, at least, of
his great themes, Milton took Dante for his guide. Without an odious
comparison, and conceding the great value, principally historical, of the
_Divina Commedia_, it must be said that the palm remains with the English
poet. Take, for a single illustration, the fall of the arch-fiend. Dante's
Lucifer falls with such force that he makes a conical hole in the earth to
its centre, and forces out a hill on the other side--a physical
prediction, as the antipodes had not yet been established. The cavity is
the seat of Hell; and the mountain, that of Purgatory. So mathematical is
his fancy, that in vignette illustrations we have right-lined drawings of
these surfaces and their different circles. Science had indeed progressed
in Milton's time, but his imagination scorns its aid; everything is with
him grandly ideal, as well as rhetorically harmonious:

... Him the Almighty power,
Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal power,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent in arms.

And when a lesser spirit falls, what a sad AEolian melody describes the
downward flight:

... How he fell
From Heaven they fabled thrown by angry Jove,
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve
A summer's day; and with the setting sun,
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.

The heavenly colloquies to which we have alluded between the Father and
the Son, involve questions of theology, and present peculiar views--such
as the subordination of the Son, and the relative unimportance of the
third Person of the Blessed Trinity. They establish Milton's Arianism
almost as completely as his Treatise on Christian Doctrine.

HIS FAULTS.--Grand, far above all human efforts, his poems fail in these
representations. God is a spirit; he is here presented as a body, and that
by an uninspired pen. The poet has not been able to carry us up to those
infinite heigh