of Hell, and
alighted on our central Earth near Eden, and gazing up to Heaven and
the Sun blazing there in meridian splendour. He had imagined Satan,
in this pause of his first advent into the Universe he was to ruin,
thus addressing the Sun as its chief visible representative:--

"O thou that with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the god
Of this new World,--at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads,--to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King!"

And now, after eighteen years, the poem having been resumed, but with
the resolution, made natural by Milton's literary observations and
experiences in the interval, that the dramatic form should be
abandoned and the epic substituted, these ten lines, written
originally for the opening of the Drama, were to be the nucleus of
the Epic.[1] With our present _Paradise Lost_ before us, we can
see the very process of the gradual reinvention. In the epic Satan
must not appear, as had been proposed in the drama, at once on our
earth or within our universe. He must be fetched from the
transcendental regions, the vast extra-mundane spaces, of his own
prior existence and history. And so, round our fair universe,
newly-created and wheeling softly on its axle, conscious as yet of no
evil, conscious only of the happy earth and sweet human life in the
midst, and of the steady diurnal change from day and light-blue
sunshine into spangled and deep-blue night, Milton was figuring and
mapping out those other infinitudes which outlay and encircled his
conception of all this mere Mundane Creation. Deep down beneath this
MUNDANE CREATION, and far separated from it, he was seeing the HELL
from which was to come its woe; all round the Mundane Creation, and
surging everywhere against its outmost firmament, was the dark and
turbid CHAOS out of which its orderly and orbicular immensity had
been cut; and high over all, radiant above Chaos, but with the
Mundane Universe pendent from it at one gleaming point, was the great
EMPYREAN or HEAVEN of HEAVENS, the abode of Angels and of Eternal
Godhead. Not to the mere Earth of Man or the Mundane Universe about
that Earth was Milton's adventurous song now