ingle speech of all
that has made Greece dear to humanity--these are the shining peaks of
the regained "Paradise," marvels of art and eloquence, yet, unlike
"Paradise Lost," beautiful rather than awful. The faults inherent in the
theme cannot be imputed to the poet. No human skill could make the
second Adam as great an object of sympathy as the first: it is enough,
and it is wonderful, that spotless virtue should be so entirely exempt
from formality and dulness. The baffled Satan, beaten at his own
weapons, is necessarily a much less interesting personage than the
heroic adventurer of "Paradise Lost." Milton has done what can be done
by softening Satan's reprobate mood with exquisite strokes of pathos:--

"Though I have lost
Much lustre of my native brightness, lost
To be beloved of God, I have not lost
To love, at least contemplate and admire
What I see excellent in good or fair,
Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense."

These words, though spoken with a deceitful intention, express a truth.
Milton's Satan is a long way from Goethe's Mephistopheles. Profound,
too, is the pathos of--

"I would be at the worst, worst is my best,
My harbour, and my ultimate repose."

The general sobriety of the style of "Paradise Regained" is a fertile
theme for the critics. It is, indeed, carried to the verge of baldness;
frigidity, used by Pattison, is too strong a word. This does not seem to
be any token of a decay of poetical power. As writers advance in life
their characteristics usually grow upon them, and develop into
mannerisms. In "Paradise Regained," and yet more markedly in "Samson
Agonistes," Milton seems to have prided himself on showing how
independent he could be of the ordinary poetical stock-in-trade. Except
in his splendid episodical descriptions he seeks to impress by the massy
substance of his verse. It is a great proof of the essentially poetical
quality of his mind that though he thus often becomes jejune, he is
never prosaic. He is ever unmistakably the poet, even when his beauties
are rather those of the orator or the moralist. The following sound
remark, for instance, would not have been poetry in Pope; it is poetry
in Milton:--

"Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still rem