story mightier, or more full of meaning, can there ever be than that of the Archangel rebelling in Heaven, degraded from Heaven into Hell, reascending from Hell to the Human Universe, winging through the starry spaces of that Universe, and at last possessing himself of our central Earth, and impregnating its incipient history with the Spirit of Evil? Vastness of scene and power of story together, little wonder that the poem should have so impressed the world. Little wonder that it should now be Milton's Satan, and Milton's narrative of the Creation in its various transcendental connections, that are in possession of the British imagination, rather than the strict Biblical accounts whence Milton so scrupulously derived the hints to which he gave such marvellous expansion. But will the power of the poem be permanent? Grand conception as it is, was it not a conception framed too much in congruity with special beliefs and modes of thinking of Milton's own age to retain its efficiency for ever? If the matters it symbolised are matters which the human imagination, and the reason of man in its most exalted mood, must ever strive to symbolise in some form or other, may not the very definiteness, the blazing visual exactness, of Milton's symbolic phantasy jar on modern modes of thought? Do we not desire, in our days also, to be left to our own liberty of symbolising in these matters, and may it not be well to prefer, in the main, symbolisms the least fixed, the least sensuous, the most fluent and cloud-like, the most tremulous to every touch of new idea or new feeling? To this objection,--an objection, however, which would apply to all great Poetry and Art whatever, and would affect the paintings of Michael Angelo, for example, as much as the Paradise Lost of Milton, -something must be conceded. Changes in human ideas since the poem was written have thrown the poem, or parts of it, farther out of keeping with the demands of the modern imagination than it can have been with the requirements of Milton's contemporaries. Not to speak of the direct traces in it of a peculiar theology in the form of speeches and arguments,—in which kind, however, there is less that need really be obsolete than some theological critics have asserted, -the Ptolemaism of Milton's astronomical scheme would alone put the poem somewhat in conflict with the educated modern conceptions of Nature. No longer now is the VOL. II. E Mundane Universe thought of as a definite succession of Orbs round the globe of Earth. No longer now can the fancy of man be stayed at any distance, however immense, by an imaginary primum mobile or outermost shell, beyond which all is Chaos. The primum mobile has been for ever burst; and into the Chaos supposed to be beyond it the imagination has voyaged out and still out, finding no Chaos, and no sign of shore or boundary, but only the same ocean of transpicuous space, with firmaments for its scattered islands, and such islands still rising to view on every farthest horizon. Thus accustomed to the idea of Nature as boundless, the mind, in one of its moods, may refuse to conceive it as bounded, and may regard the attempt to do so as a treason against pure truth. All this must be conceded, though the effects of the concession will not stop at Paradise Lost. But there are other moods of the mind, moral and spiritual moods, which poesy is bound to serve; and, just as Milton, in the interest of these, knowingly and almost avowedly repudiated the obligation of consistency with physical science as known to himself, and set up a great symbolic phantasy, so to this day the phantasy which he did set up has, for those anyway like-minded to him, lost none of its sublime significance. For all such is not that Physical Universe, which we have learnt not to bound, still, in its inconceivable totality, but as a drop hung from the Empyrean; is not darkness around it; is not Hell beneath it? And what though all are not such? Is it not the highest function of a book to perpetuate like-mindedness to its author after he is gone, and may not Paradise Lost be doing this? Nay, and what though the relevancy of the poem to the present soul of the world should have been more impaired by the lapse of time and the change of ideas than we have admitted it to be, and much of the interest of it, as of all the other great poems of the world, should now be historical? Even so what interest it possesses ! What a portrait, what a study, of a great English mind of the seventeenth century it brings before us! "I wonder not so much at the poem itself, though worthy of all wonder," says Bentley in the preface to his edition of the poem, "as that the author could so abstract his thoughts from his own troubles as to be able to make it,--that, confined in a narrow and to him a dark chamber, surrounded with cares and fears, he could expatiate at large through the compass of the whole Universe, and through all Heaven beyond it, and could survey all periods of time from before the creation to the consummation of all things. This theory, no doubt, was a great solace to him in his affliction, but it shows in him a greater strength of spirit, that made him capable of such a solace. And it would almost seem to me to be peculiar to him, had not experience by others taught me that there is that power in the human mind, supported with innocence and conscia virtus, that can make it shake off all outward uneasiness and involve itself secure and pleased in its own integrity and entertainment." It is refreshing to be able to quote from the great scholar and critic words showing so deep an appreciation of the real significance of the poem which, as an editor, he mangled. Whatever Paradise Lost is, it is, as Bentley here points out, a monument of almost unexampled personal magnanimity. It is not improbable that Milton's blindness, which we are apt to think of as a disqualification for poetry, as for other things, may, in the case of Paradise Lost, have been a positive qualification. One can imagine many effects of blindness on the mind of a poet. Milton himself, as if with a presentiment of what was one day to be his own fate, had more than once, in his earlier poems, touched on this very theme. One remembers also those lines in Paradise Lost itself (III. 33-36) where he tells us of the secret pleasure he had in associating himself with his famous blind predecessors of the ancient world : "Those other two, equalled with me in fate And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old." As to those old poets and prophets blindness had given "the profounder insight," might it not be so also in his case? For this at least he prays :— "So much the rather thou, Celestial Light, Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight." But not only in this semi-mystic sense, so dear to Milton and so natural to his mode of thought, might it be contended that in his great poem his blindness was even a qualification. Nor yet need it be meant merely, in a more prosaic consideration, that his blindness, by shutting in his mind from external objects, concentrated it on his daring theme and left him at more liberty to pursue it. Nor, again, need we have in view only that influence which would be exerted over his poetry, and especially over the structure and music of his verse, by the fact that his blindness prevented him from composing on paper, and compelled him to compose mentally. These and other influences of blindness may have all had effects. But the influence of which we now speak is something more peculiar and specific. The one sensation, as we may fancy, ever directly present to a blind man, who had once enjoyed sight, would be that of infinitely extended surrounding darkness or blackness. In Milton's case, we learn from himself, it was not quite so in the first years of his blindness, though it may have gradually become so afterwards. Writing in Latin, on the 28th of September 1654, to his Greek friend Philaras, in answer to a letter which Philaras had sent him, giving him hope that his blindness might not be incurable, and requesting a statement of the symptoms of his case, which Philaras might submit to the celebrated surgeon and oculist, Thevenot of Paris, Milton gives various particulars as to the manner in which his blindness had come on, and his sensations after it had become total. It had been gradually coming on for ten years; the left eye had failed first; then the right, the vision of which had begun to be sensibly affected three years before the time of his then writing. Before this eye had quite failed, i.e. before his blindness could be called total, there had seemed to come from his shut eyes, on his lying down at night, copious bursts or suffusions of glittering light; but, as from day to day his vision faded towards extinction, these flashes of light had been exchanged for similar bursts of fainter colours, shot as with audible force from the eyes. "Now, however," he adds, "as if lucency were extinct, it is a mere blackness, or a blackness dashed, and, as it were, inwoven with an ashy colour, that is wont to pour itself forth; yet the darkness which is perpetually before me, by night as well as by day, seems always nearer to a whitish than to a blackish, and such that, when the eye rolls itself, there is admitted, as through a small chink, a certain little trifle of light.' As this was written when Milton had been blind not more than somewhere about two years at the utmost, may we not suppose that the process of darkening which he describes had continued, and that, by the time he had begun his Paradise Lost, even that little chink of which he speaks had been barred, so that the medium in which he found himself, night and day, had then less of the whitish or ash-grey in it, and more of the hue of absolute black? Such a supposition would accord with his own words in the poem (III. 41-49) : "Not to me returns : Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Of Nature's works." And, more decidedly, we seem to see the same suggested in the words of Samson respecting his blindness (Sams. Agon. 80, 81): “O, dark, dark, dark! amid the blaze of noon Now, whether the medium in which a man moved who had lost his sight were such a total opaque of infinitely extended blackness, or only a paler surrounding darkness of ashy gloom, in what would his imaginations of things physical consist? Would they not consist in carving this medium into zones, divisions, and shapes, in painting phantasmagories upon it or in it, in summoning up within it or projecting into it combinations of such recollections of the once visible world as remained strongest and dearest in the memory? But are there not certain classes of images, certain kinds of visual recollection, that would be easier in such a state of blindness than others? While the recollections of minute and indifferent objects became dimmer and dimmer,—while it might be difficult for a man long blind to recall with exactness the appearance, for example, of such a flower as |