t could hold him for
a moment--he saw very plainly that he would be cast away on the waters
of existence.

So the battle raged in his proud and twisted spirit, which took
everything so hard--his nature imperatively commanding him to keep
his work and his power for usefulness; his conscience telling him as
urgently that if he sought to wield authority, he must obey it.

He entered the beech-grove at the height of this misery, flaming with
rebellion against the dilemma which Fate had placed before him; visited
by gusts of resentment against a passion, which forced him to pay the
price, either of his career, or of his self-respect; gusts, followed by
remorse that he could so for one moment regret his love for that tender
creature. The face of Lucifer was not more dark, more tortured, than
Miltoun's face in the twilight of the grove, above those kingdoms of
the world, for which his ambition and his conscience fought. He threw
himself down among the trees; and stretching out his arms, by chance
touched a beetle trying to crawl over the grassless soil. Some bird had
maimed it. He took the little creature up. The beetle truly could no
longer work, but it was spared the fate lying before himself. The beetle
was not, as he would be, when his power of movement was destroyed,
conscious of his own wasted life. The world would not roll away down
there. He would still see himself cumbering the ground, when his powers
were taken, from him. This thought was torture. Why had he been suffered
to meet her, to love her, and to be loved by her? What had made him
so certain from the first moment, if she were not meant for him? If he
lived to be a hundred, he would never meet another. Why, because of his
love, must he bury the will and force of a man? If there were no more
coherence in God's scheme than this, let him too be incoherent! Let him
hold authority, and live outside authority! Why stifle his powers
for the sake of a coherence which did not exist! That would indeed be
madness greater than that of a mad world!

There was no answer to his thoughts in the stillness of the grove,
unless it were the cooing of a dove, or the faint thudding of the
sheep issuing again into sunlight. But slowly that stillness stole into
Miltoun's spirit. "Is it like this in the grave?" he thought. "Are the
boughs of those trees the dark earth over me? And the sound in them
the sound the dead hear when flowers are growing, and the wind passing
through them?