How heart-rending his story of the fall, and of the bitter sorrow of our first parents, whose fatal act

Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.

How marvellous is the combat at Hell-gate, between Satan and Death; how terrible the power at which “Hell itself grew darker”!  How we strive to shade our mind’s eye as we enter again with him into the courts of Heaven.  How refreshingly beautiful the perennial bloom of Eden: 

    Picta velut primo Vere coruscat humus.

What a wonderful story of the teeming creation related to our first parents by the lips of Raphael: 

    When from the Earth appeared
    The tawny lion, pawing to get free
    His hinder parts, then springs as broke from bonds,
    And rampant shakes his brinded mane.

And withal, how compact the poem, how perfect the drama.  It is Paradise, perfect in beauty and holiness; attacked with devilish art; in danger; betrayed; lost!

    Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked and ate;
    Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
    Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe
    That all was lost!

Unit-like, complete, brilliant, sublime, awful, the poem dazzles criticism, and belittles the critic.  It is the grandest poem ever written.  It almost sets up a competition with Scripture.  Milton’s Adam and Eve walk before us instead of the Adam and Eve of Genesis.  Milton’s Satan usurps the place of that grotesque, malignant spirit of the Bible, which, instead of claiming our admiration, excites only our horror, as he goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.  He it is who can declare

    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?

MILTON AND DANTE.—­It has been usual for the literary critic to compare Milton and Dante; and it is certain that in the conception, at least, of his great themes, Milton took Dante for his guide.  Without an odious comparison, and conceding the great value, principally historical, of the Divina Commedia, it must be said that the palm remains with the English poet.  Take, for a single illustration, the fall of the arch-fiend.  Dante’s Lucifer falls with such force that he makes a conical hole in the earth to its centre, and forces out a hill on the other side—­a physical prediction, as the antipodes had not yet been established.  The cavity is the seat of Hell; and the mountain, that of Purgatory.  So mathematical is his fancy, that in vignette illustrations we have right-lined drawings of these surfaces and their different circles.  Science had indeed progressed in Milton’s time, but his imagination scorns its aid; everything is with him grandly ideal, as well as rhetorically harmonious: