disastrous twilight over half the nations-the moon whose orb through optic glass the Tuscan artist views-the tallest pine hewn on Norwegian hill-and innumerable others. We must also part with the graceful vicissitude of day and night in heaven-and the dark and dreary vales, regions dolorous, the frozen and fiery alps, rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs and dens of hell. Whatever relates to place and succession must be omitted from the poet's description of either; and in fact it would be difficult to propose any way in which he could describe them at all; for if the principle were strictly enforced, he could not assign to either any locality or include them within any temporal limits. Heaven could have had no mural wall-no breach to repair;-hell no triple gates for sin to open. In the meanwhile, it should be remembered, that philosophy has failed to resolve the difficulties attending these important subjects. What then? Must the Poet forbear, until the Philosopher has made his way smooth and certain? But imagination has her conquests to make, as well as reason; and disdains to be bound down by the laws of a formal logic. It is free from the limits of the understanding, and claims a privilege of making discoveries in a sublimer region, and of giving shape to the formless and the void. How is this to be done but with such materials as are in her power? Words are the poet's materials, which are to him as colours to the painter; the former undertakes to represent to the intellectual vision, what the latter portrays to the bodily eye. A shape is indispensable to the intelligibility of the object; and we have no shapes, no images, but of the material and corporeal. The only difference between Milton and the philosophers, is, that under their theory of distinct substances, such ideas are expressed by means of allegory; and according to Milton's doctrine of their identity, such images would be visible symbols and living portions of what they represented. The critics have judged of the battle of the angels, and the episode of Sin and Death upon different grounds; both ought to have been considered in the same manner. The allegory is broken, say they, when Death offers battle to Satan. But, in fact, this episode is not more allegorical than the other. They are both of the same character, and are portions of each other. Sin and Death must be considered equally real persons as the other actors, and all that relates to them as an essential portion of the action. For what is the subject ? the origin of evil, and its introduction into this world. To illustrate this, he constructs a fable, which, divested of its poetical inversions, may be thus related. Upon a day in eternity, the Almighty summoned the Angelic Hierarchies before his throne, and declared the generation of the Messiah, and anointed him King. But Satan, of the first, if not the first archangel, thence conceiving envy, rebels with the third part of heaven's host, whom he arrays for battle in the quarters of the North. Here pain surprises him, his eyes become dim, and his head throws forth flames, until, on the left side, Sin springs out of his head, "shining heavenly fair, a goddess armed." The angels are won with her attractive graces; but Satan is 4 K N. S. VOL. I chiefly enamoured with her, and she conceives a son. Meanwhile war arises, fields are fought in heaven. Satan and his host are expelled from the celestial regions by the conquering omnipotence of Messiah. They are driven down into the midst of hell, situated in chaos, fortified with adamantine gates, of which the keys are intrusted to Sin, hell's porteress. Here she is delivered of her ghastly son, whom she calls Death, according to the passage in the Epistle of James i. 25. "Lust, when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." Satan and his host were nine days falling from heaven to hell, and lay nine days upon the fiery gulf" confounded, though immortal." Meanwhile the Messiah, in order to repair heaven's loss, proceeds in the creation of this earth and of its inhabitants; in sovereignty over which he places man and woman. There had been a prophecy in heaven respecting this creation, which is remembered by the vanquished angels, after they have recovered from the confusion of their fall. They consult; and it is finally determined, that Satan shall penetrate beyond the confines of the infernal region into the new created world, for the purpose of seducing the lords thereof to disobedience, and making them partakers of his eternal punishment, "which would be all his solace and revenge, as a despite done against the Most High." He sets out upon this expedition, and arrives at the gates of Hell, where he is recognised by his daughter and their son. These conceive it to be to their interest to assist his enterprise. She betrays her trust, the infernal gates are thrown open, and cannot be shut again he passes Chaos, and arrives at Eden. After going through some adventures, he succeeds in his tempta tion, though both Adam and Eve have been warned of his coming, and its object. They fall, and in them all their posterity. But their redemption is provided for in the counsels of God, and undertaken by the Messiah. Sin and Death follow Satan, their sire, up to the place of man; and, for a more convenient passage between hell and earth, erect a massy bridge over Chaos. They proceed at once to their work of destruction. Adam and Eve are, in consequence of their fall, expelled from Paradise. Thus far Satan's object is accomplished, and the world is subjected to the dominion of Sin and Death. The Almighty, however, foretells the final victory of his Son over them, and the renewing of all things; which prophecy is communicated to Adam previous to his expulsion, with the order of Providence in the government of the world, until this consummation shall arrive. The action of the poem commences in eternity: the duration of the action. "Measures this transient world, the race of time, Book xii. 554-556. The moral of the poem is given by the poet himself, in the conclusion of the same passage, in which Adam proceeds to say:— " Greatly instructed, I shall hence depart, Accomplishing great things; by things deemed weak And, to the faithful, Death the Gate of Life; To which the angel rejoins, "Thou hast attained the sum of wisdom;" Book xii. 556-573. Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith; Book xii. 575-587. Now this outline, which, even at this time of day, the reader will think we are justified in sketching, plainly demonstrates, whatever the critic may suppose, that it was never the Poet's intention that one part of it should be more allegorical than another. The whole is an animated symbol of events, passing "beyond the flaming bounds of space and time," as also of every occurrence that may be included within their extreme limits. The events of the first class are exhibited under the relation of cause and effect, and in succession; and actors purely spiritual, under the conditions of beings partly spiritual, and partly corporeal; because the former are essentially invisible to us and in poetry, it is as necessary to make them visible to the intellectual, as in painting to the natural eye; which can only be done by assimilating them to the objects of sense, by means of images derived therefrom. It is in the association of these images, that the poet's fancy is exerted, and the reader's excited, and without the intervention of these, the poet's imagination would only produce ideas without form, and beings without shape. He could not have distinguished either hell or heaven from chaos. He must have presented each of them as a "void and formless infinite," and equally unimaginable with "The secrets of that hoary deep, and dark, Illimitable ocean without bound, Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height Book i. 891 -894. Milton, perceiving that it was necessary to call in the aid of his fancy, availed himself of his poetical privilege, and removed all limits from its exercise. Fortunately there was nothing in his philosophical creed to restrain his poetical ambition. His imagination fearlessly presumed "an earthly guest, to draw empyreal air"-and as fearlessly ventured down the dark descent. Heaven hid nothing from his view, nor the deep tract of hell. Yet it was not the tendency of his mind thus to incorporate the spiritual invisible phenomena, and we are persuaded that nothing but the necessity of the subject would have induced him to resort to this expedient. This the platonic character of his political and religious writings justifies us in asserting. But having convinced himself of the propriety of this mode of proceeding, he abandoned his imagination without reserve, to all its requisitions, and took advantage of all the exemptions which might be demanded from the ordinary rules of logic and philosophy. Yet with what delight he benefits by every opportunity to manifest the predisposition of his genius, as exhibited in "Comus," and afterwards in "Paradise Regained," and, in truth, also evidenced by his choice of subject for this his great epic, though found impracticable in its execution. Frequently he exerts his imagination alone, and is fond of presenting his creation indistinct and unrealised. Such are the beings with whom Satan meets in chaos-Powers and Spirits that reside in noise ancient Night enthroned with Chaos-with Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name of Demogorgon standing by "Rumour next and chance, And tumult and confusion all embroiled, And discord with a thousand various mouths." Book ii. 965–968. So also in Lycidas, in a passage intended to convey the impres sion of reality, he nevertheless consents to refine his objects into the substance of a fable and a vision. But to his mind these were realities, and he communicates the same feeling to the reader's. "Or whether thou to our moist vows denied And the great vision of the guarded mount." But these are exceptions in the execution of his great work; his principal aim was to embody and realise. Wherever he describes his angels as purely spiritual, and attributes to them the acts of incorporeal beings, these instances must be looked upon only as indications of his desire as to the manner of its execution, had it been possible-Indeed, it may be doubted, after all the disputes upon this subject, whether he has not maintained the incorporeality of his spiritual beings, throughout the Poem. For he describes them not as necessarily having a body, but as adopting any form that might best suit their occasions. "All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear, Book vi, 350-353. There is also, we think, a deeper reason for adopting a course so clean contrary to the natural disposition of his genius, which we shall subsequently notice. Addison observed, that to construct such a poem in the English language was like building a palace of brick. Any other language would equally have fallen short of its transcendent sublimity, and in this remark that elegant writer improperly underrated his own. All language is unequal to such high argument, and those readers only are capable of appreciating the poet's excellence in whose minds his images awaken the "thoughts that wander through eternity," and which, partaking of its nature, are, like it, ineffable. They only are capable of appreciating the poet's excellence, who can conceive of the poem as existing in the poet's mind, before it was reduced to expression, and condensed in numbers, "when," to quote from Dryden, "the fancy was yet in its first work moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and then either chosen or rejected by the judgement." It is not in the picturesque and the harmonious-(and who is superior to him in these excellences?)—that Milton is chiefly laudable, but in the ideality of his conceptions. In this he is incomparable. The fancy of Shakspere was more active to invent, more fertile in expedients to embody-but the imagination of Milton was vigorous to shape, and expansive to create. Yet what an extensive range, though of a different class, had the fancy of Milton for a dominion-over what a wide field of experience, though different in kind, like the "flower-shaped Psyche," had she liberty to wander; and with what exquisite judgment were her selections made from the choice treasures that had been subdued to her demands, and from which, like the "chemic bee," she extracted the "honey-dew!" With what magical effect are his pictures painted! Who has ever read the following passage without transport? "Then straight commands that at the warlike sound Of trumpets loud and clarions be upreared Who forthwith from the glittering staff unfurled |