airfax,
Cromwell, and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the best is, perhaps, the
sonnet written on the massacre of the Vaudois Protestants--"a collect in
verse," it has been called--which has the fire of a Hebrew prophet
invoking the divine wrath upon the oppressors of Israel. Two were on his
own blindness, and in these there is not one selfish repining, but only
a regret that the value of his service is impaired--

Will God exact day labor, light denied?

After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, Milton was for a while in
peril, by reason of the part that he had taken against the king. But

On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness and with dangers compassed round
And solitude,

he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he becomes the most heroic
and affecting figure in English literary history. Years before he had
planned an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur, and again a sacred
tragedy on man's fall and redemption. These experiments finally took
shape in _Paradise Lost_, which was given to the world in 1667. This is
the epic of English Puritanism and of Protestant Christianity. It was
Milton's purpose to

assert eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to men,

or, in other words, to embody his theological system in verse. This
gives a doctrinal rigidity and even dryness to parts of the _Paradise
Lost_, which injure its effect as a poem. His "God the father turns a
school divine:" his Christ, as has been wittily said, is "God's good
boy:" the discourses of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures: Adam
himself is too sophisticated for the state of innocence, and Eve is
somewhat insipid. The real protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon whose
mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed something of his own nature,
and whose words of defiance might almost have come from some Republican
leader when the Good Old Cause went down.

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.

But when all has been said that can be said in disparagement or
qualification, _Paradise Lost_ remains the foremost of English poems and
the sublimest of all epics. Even in those parts where theology
encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, though often heavy, is never
languid. Milton's blank verse in itself is enough to bear up the most
prosaic theme, and so is his epic