another, with the voice of their Maker walking in the garden, and ministering angels attendant on their steps, winged messengers from heaven like rosy clouds descending in their sight.  Nature played around them her virgin fancies wild; and spread for them a repast where no crude surfeit reigned.  Was there nothing in this scene, which God and nature alone witnessed, to interest a modern critic?  What need was there of action, where the heart was full of bliss and innocence without it!  They had nothing to do but feel their own happiness, and “know to know no more.”  “They toiled not, neither did they spin; yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”  All things seem to acquire fresh sweetness, and to be clothed with fresh beauty in their sight.  They tasted as it were for themselves and us, of all that there ever was pure in human bliss.  “In them the burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened.”  They stood awhile perfect, but they afterwards fell, and were driven out of Paradise, tasting the first fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss.  But their pangs were such as a pure spirit might feel at the sight—­their tears “such as angels weep.”  The pathos is of that mild contemplative kind which arises from regret for the loss of unspeakable happiness, and resignation to inevitable fate.  There is none of the fierceness of intemperate passion, none of the agony of mind and turbulence of action, which is the result of the habitual struggles of the will with circumstances, irritated by repeated disappointment, and constantly setting its desires most eagerly on that which there is an impossibility of attaining.  This would have destroyed the beauty of the whole picture.  They had received their unlooked-for happiness as a free gift from their Creator’s hands, and they submitted to its loss, not without sorrow, but without impious and stubborn repining.

      “In either hand the hast’ning angel caught
      Our ling’ring parents, and to th’ eastern gate
      Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
      To the subjected plain; then disappear’d. 
      They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
      Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
      Wav’d over by that flaming brand, the gate
      With dreadful faces throng’d, and fiery arms: 
      Some natural tears they dropt, but wip’d them soon;
      The world was all before them, where to choose
      Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.”

LECTURE IV.  ON DRYDEN AND POPE.