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 to be confined, representing only dramatically by means of speeches and choruses those transactions in the three extramundane Infinitudes that might bear on the terrestrial story.  It must dare also into those infinitudes themselves, pursue among them the vaster and more general story of Satan’s rebellion and fall, and yet make all converge, through Satan’s scheme in Hell and his advent at last into our World, upon that one catastrophe of the ruin of infant Mankind which the title of the poem proclaimed as the particular theme.

[Footnote 1:  Phillips’s words in quoting these lines are, “In the Fourth Book of the Poem there are six [he says six, but quotes all the ten] verses which, several years before the Poem was begun, were shown to me and some others as designed for the very beginning of the said Tragedy.”  These words, if the Epic was begun in 1658, might carry us back at farthest to about 1650 as the date when the ten lines were in existence; but, besides that Phillips’s expression is vague, we have Aubrey’s words in 1680 as follows:—­“In the [4th] Book of Paradise Lost there are about six verses of Satan’s exclamation to the Sun which Mr. E. Phi. remembers about fifteen or sixteen years before ever his Poem was thought of; which verses were intended for the beginning of a Tragoedie, which he had designed, but was diverted from it by other business.”  This, on Phillips’s own authority, would take the lines back to 1642 or 1643; and that, on independent grounds, is the probable date.  Hardly after 1642 or 1643 can Milton have adhered to his original intention of writing Paradise Lost in a dramatic form.]

  “Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
  Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
  Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
  With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
  Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
  Sing, Heavenly Muse”—­

Such might be the simple invocation at the outset; but, knowing now all that the epic was really to involve, and how far it was to carry him in flight above the Aonian Mount, little wonder that he could already promise in it

  “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.”