But in spite of Adam, in spite of everything that can be said against it, Paradise Lost remains a splendid poem.  Never, perhaps, has the English language been used more nobly, never has blank verse taken on such stately measure.  Milton does not make pictures for us, like some poets, like Spenser, for instance; he sings to us.  He sings to us, not like the gay minstrel with his lute, but in stately measured tones, which remind us most of solemn organ chords.  His voice comes to us, too, out of a poet’s country through which, if we would find our way, we must put our hand in his and let him guide us while he sings.  And only when we come to love “the best words in the best order” can we truly enjoy Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Milton fails at times to interest us in Adam, but he does interest us in the Bad Angel Satan, and it has been said over and over again that Satan is his true hero.  And with such a man as Milton this was hardly to be wondered at.  All his life had been a cry for liberty—­liberty even when it bordered on rebellion.  And so he could not fail to make his arch rebel grand, and even in his last degradation we somehow pity him, while feeling that he is almost too high for pity.  Listen to Satan’s cry of sorrow and defiance when he finds himself cast out from Heaven:—­

    “‘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 his is best,
    Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
    Above his equals.  Farewell, happy fields,
    Where joy for ever 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.’”

Then in contrast to this outburst of regal defiance, read the last beautiful lines of the poem and see in what softened mood of submission Milton pictures our first parents as they leave the Happy Garden:—­

    “In either hand the hastening Angel caught
    Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate
    Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast
    To the subjected plain—­then disappeared. 
    They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld