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the old books of Astronomy. The following is a copy (a little neater than the original, but otherwise exact) from a woodcut in an edition, in 1610, of the Sphæra of Joannes a Sacrobosco, with commentaries and additions by Clavius and others.1

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This, literally this, so far as mere diagram can represent it, is the World, or Cosmos, or Mundane Universe, as Milton keeps it in his mind's eye throughout the poem. It is an enormous azure round of

1 Joannes a Sacrobosco, or John Holywood, was an English mathematician of the thirteenth century, who lived and died in Paris; and his treatise De Sphæra, as amended by later writers, continued for several centuries to be the favourite manual of Astronomy throughout Europe. Milton himself used it in teaching his pupils, as we learn from his nephew Phillips. With respect to the above cut (which I have selected from among many similar cuts in old manuals of Astronomy), it seems only necessary to guard the reader against the mistake of supposing that it represents the Mundane System in section precisely as in the former cuts. On the contrary, it represents the interior of the Cosmos as looked down into, in equatorial section, from the pole of the ecliptic. It is, in short, a view vertically down from the opening at the pole in the preceding cut,-the axis not being from top to bottom of the cut, but from the eye to the centre.

space, scooped or carved out of Chaos, and communicating aloft with the Empyrean, but consisting within itself of ten Orbs or hollow Spheres in succession, wheeling one within the other, down to the stationary nest of our small Earth at the centre, with the elements of water, air and fire that are immediately around it. It is according to this scheme that Milton virtually describes the process of Creation in the first, the second, and the fourth of the six days of Genesis (VII. 232 -275 and 339-386): the only deviation being that the word. "Firmament" is not there applied specifically to the 8th or Starry Sphere, but is used for the whole continuous depth of all the heavens as far as to the Primum Mobile. As if to prevent any mistake, however, there is one passage in which the Ten Spheres are actually enumerated. It is that (III. 481-483) where the attempted ascent of ambitious souls from Earth to the Empyrean by their own effort is described. In order to reach the opening into the Empyrean at the World's zenith, what are the successive stages of their flight?

"They pass the Planets Seven, and pass the Fixed,

And that Crystalline Sphere whose balance weighs
The trepidation talked, and that First Moved."

Here we have the Alphonsine heavens in their order, and with their exact names. But all through the poem the language assumes the same astronomical system. Where the words Orb and Sphere occur, for example, they almost invariably,—not quite invariably,—mean Orb or Sphere in the Ptolemaic sense. Yet, to make all safe, Milton, as we have seen, inserts two passages at least in which the Copernican theory of the heavens is distinctly suggested as a possible or probable alternative; and, moreover, even while using the language of the other theory, he so arranged that it need not be supposed he did so for any other reason than that of poetical preference.

In one respect the diagram must fail to convey Milton's complete notion of the World or Mundane Universe at that moment when he supposes the Fiend first gazing down into it from the glorious opening at the pole, and then plunging precipitate through its azure depths (III. 561-566) in quest of the particular spot in it where Man had his abode. That small Earth which is so conspicuous in the diagram, as being at the centre, either was not visible even to angelic eyes from such an amazing distance as the opening at the pole of the primum mobile, or was not yet marked. The luminary

that attracts Satan first, from its all-surpassing splendour,-at all events after he has passed the three outermost spheres, and so come within the glittering belt of the fixed constellations and galaxies,—is the Sun. Though the tenant only of the fourth of the Spheres, this luminary so far surpasses all others in majesty that it seems like the King not only of the seven Planetary Orbs, but of all the ten. It seems the very God of the whole new Universe, shooting its radiance even through the beds of the stars, as far as to the primum mobile itself (III. 571-587). It is thither, accordingly, that Satan bends. his flight; it is on this of all the bodies in the new Universe that he first alights; and it is only after the Angel Uriel, whom he there encounters, and who does not recognise him in his disguise, has pointed out to him the Earth shining at a distance in the sunlight (III. 722-724) that he knows the exact scene of his further labours. Thus informed, he wings off again from the Sun's body, and, wheeling his steep flight towards the Earth, alights at length on the top of Niphates, near Eden.

There is no need to follow the action of the poem farther in this Introduction. All that takes place after the arrival of Satan on the Earth, all that large portion of the story that is enacted within the bounds of Eden or of Paradise, amid those terrestrial scenes of "bowery loneliness," with brooks "mazily murmuring" and "bloom profuse of cedar arches," of the quieter charm of which Tennyson speaks as competing in his mind with admiration of the Titanic and Cosmical grandeurs of the rest of the poem,-the reader can without difficulty make out for himself; or any such incidental elucidation as may be needed may be reserved for the Notes. It is necessary to take account here only of certain final modifications in Milton's imaginary physical structure of the Universe which occur after the Tempter has succeeded in his enterprise and Man has fallen.

In the first place there is then established, what did not exist before, a permanent communication between Hell and Man's Universe. When Satan had come up through Chaos from Hell-gate, he had done so with toil and difficulty, as one exploring his way; but no sooner had he succeeded in his mission than Sin and Death, whom he had left at Hell-gate, felt themselves instinctively aware of his success, and of the necessity there would thenceforward be of a distinct road between Hell and the New World, by which all the Infernals might go and come. Accordingly (X. 282-324) they do

construct such a road: a wonderful causey or bridge from Hell-gate, right through or over Chaos, to that exact part of the outside of the new Universe where Satan had first alighted, i.e. not to its nadir, but to some point near its zenith, where there is the break or orifice in the primun mobile towards the Empyrean. And what is the consequence of this vast alteration in the physical structure of the Universe? The consequence is that the Infernal Host are no longer confined to Hell, but possess also the new Universe, like an additional island, or pleasure-domain, up in Chaos, and on the very confines of their former home, the Empyrean. Preferring this conquest to their proper empire in Hell, they are thenceforward perhaps more frequently in our World than in Hell, winging through its various Spheres, but inhabiting chiefly the Air round our central Earth. But this causey from Hell to the World, constructed by Sin and Death, is not the only modification of the Mundane Universe consequent on the Fall. The interior of the Human World as it hangs from the Empyrean receives some alterations for the worse by the decree of the Almighty Himself. The elements immediately round the Earth become harsher and more malignant; the planetary and starry spheres are so influenced that thenceforward planets and stars look inward upon the central Earth with aspects of malevolence; nay, perhaps it was now first that, either by a heaving askance of the Earth from its former position, or by a change in the Sun's path, the ecliptic became oblique to the equator (X. 651-691). All this is apart from changes in the actual body of the Earth, including the obliteration of the site of the desecrated Paradise, and the outbreak of virulence among all things animate.

From the foregoing sketch, it will be seen that, while the poem is properly enough, as the name Paradise Lost indicates, the tragical story of the temptation and fall of the human race in its first parents, yet this story is included in a more comprehensive epic, of which the rebel Archangel is the hero, and the theatre of which is nothing less than Universal Infinitude. While the consummation, as regards Man, is the loss of innocence and Eden, and the liability to Death, and while the last objects that we see, in respect of this consummation, are the outcast pair, with the world all before them where to choose, taking their solitary way through Eden after their expulsion from Paradise, the consummation, as regards Satan, is more in the nature of a triumph. He has succeeded in his enterprise. He has vitiated

the new World at its beginning, and he has added it as a conquest to the Hell which had been assigned to him and his for their only proper realm. True, in the very hour of his triumph a curse has been pronounced upon him; he and his host experience a farther abasement by being transmuted into the image of the Serpent; and he and they are left with the expectation of a time when their supposed conquest will be snatched from them, and they will be driven in ignominy back to whence they came. Still, for the present, and until that "greater Man" arise who is to restore the human race, and be the final and universal victor, they are left in successful possession. Whatever the sequel is to be (and it is foreshadowed in vision in the two last books) the Epic has here reached its natural close. Its purpose was to furnish the imagination with such a story of transcendent construction as should connect the mysteries of the inconceivable and immeasurable universe anterior to Time and to Man with the traditions and experience of our particular planet. This is accomplished by fastening the imagination on one great being, supposed to belong to the thronging multitudes of the angelic race that peopled the Empyrean before our World was created; by following this being in his actions as a rebel in Heaven and then as an exile into Hell; and by leaving him at last so far in possession of the new Universe of Man that thenceforward his part as an Archangel is almost forgotten, and he is content with his new and degraded function as the Devil of the merely terrestrial regions. Thenceforward he and his are to dwell more in these terrestrial regions, and particularly in the air, than in Hell, mingling themselves devilishly in human affairs, and even, by a splendid stroke of diabolic policy, enjoying the worship of men while securing their ruin, by passing themselves off as gods and demigods of all kinds of mongrel mythologies. That this is the main course and purport of the Epic will be perceived all the more clearly if the reader will note how much of the action, though it all bears ultimately on the fate of Earth, takes place away from the Earth altogether, and at a rate different from that of earthly causation, in the Empyrean, in Hell, in Chaos, or among the orbs and starry interspaces of the entire Cosmos. The portions of the poem that are occupied with descriptions of Eden and Paradise and with the narrative of events there are richly beautiful and attractive; but they do not make more altogether than a fraction of the whole.

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