Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray
    Had in her sober livery all things clad;
    Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
    They to their grassy couch, these to their nests
    Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale. 
    She all night long her amorous descant sung: 
    Silence was pleased.  Now glowed the firmament
    With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
    The starry host, rode brightest, till the Moon,
    Rising in clouded majesty, at length
    Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
    And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.

So also Milton’s Almighty, considered purely as a literary character, is unfortunately tinged with the narrow and literal theology of the time.  He is a being enormously egotistic, the despot rather than the servant of the universe, seated upon a throne with a chorus of angels about him eternally singing his praises and ministering to a kind of divine vanity.  It is not necessary to search heaven for such a character; the type is too common upon earth.  But in Satan Milton breaks away from crude mediaeval conceptions; he follows the dream again, and gives us a character to admire and understand: 

    “Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,”
    Said then the lost Archangel, “this the seat
    That we must change for Heaven?—­this mournful gloom
    For that celestial light?  Be it so, since He
    Who now is sovran can dispose and bid
    What shall be right:  farthest from Him is best,
    Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
    Above his equals.  Farewell, happy fields,
    Where joy forever dwells!  Hail, horrors! hail,
    Infernal World! and thou, profoundest Hell,
    Receive thy new possessor—­one who brings
    A mind not to be changed by place or time. 
    The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. 
    What matter where, if I be still the same,
    And what I should be, all but less than he
    Whom thunder hath made greater?  Here at least
    We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
    Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: 
    Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
    To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: 
    Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

In this magnificent heroism Milton has unconsciously immortalized the Puritan spirit, the same unconquerable spirit that set men to writing poems and allegories when in prison for the faith, and that sent them over the stormy sea in a cockleshell to found a free commonwealth in the wilds of America.

For a modern reader the understanding of Paradise Lost presupposes two things,—­a knowledge of the first chapters of the Scriptures, and of the general principles of Calvinistic theology; but it is a pity to use the poem, as has so often been done, to teach a literal acceptance of one or the other.  Of the theology of Paradise Lost the least said the better; but to the splendor of the Puritan dream and the glorious melody of its expression no words can do justice.  Even a slight acquaintance will make the reader understand why it ranks with the Divina Commedia of Dante, and why it is generally accepted by critics as the greatest single poem in our literature.