become the subject of the work--the Fall of
man consoled by the promise and undertaking of his Redemption.

The narrative of the Fall, delivered with an awful and a pathetic
simplicity to us in a few words in the first chapter of Genesis, becomes
accordingly the groundwork of the Poem; and these few words, with a few
more scattered through the Scriptures, and barely hinting Celestial
transactions, the War and Fall of the Angels, are by a genius, as daringly
as powerfully creative, expanded into the mighty dimensions of an Epic.
That unspeakable hope, foreshown to Adam as to be accomplished in distant
generations, pouring an exhilarating beam upon the darkness of man's
self-wrought destruction, which saves the catastrophe of the poem from
utter despair, and which tranquillizes the sadness, has to be interwoven
in the poet's narrative of the Fall. How stupendous the art that has
disposed and ordered the immensity!--comprehended the complexity of the
subject into a clearly harmonized, musically proportionate Whole!

Unless the Paradise Lost had risen from the soul of Milton as a
hymn--unless he had begun to sing as a worshipper with his hands uplifted
before the altar of incense, the choice of the subject would have been
more than bold--it would have been the daring of presumption--an act of
impiety. For he will put in dialogue God the Father and God the
Son--disclosing their supreme counsels. He has prayed to the Third Person
of the Godhead for light and succour. If this were a fetch of human wit,
it was in the austere zealot and puritan a mockery. To a devout Roman
Catholic poet, we could forgive every thing. For nursed among legends and
visual representations of the invisible--panoplied in a childlike imposed
faith from the access of impiety--his paternoster and his ave-marie more
familiar to his lips than his bread, almost so as their breath--the most
audacious representations may come to him vividly and naturally, without a
scruple and without a thought. But Milton, the purged, the chastened, a
spiritual iconoclast, drinking his faith by his own thirst on the waters
of Zion, a champion whose weapons from the armoury of God "are given him
tempered"--he to holy things cannot lay other than an awful hand. We know
that he believed himself under a peculiar guidance. Surely, he had had
visions of glory which, when he designed the poem that would include
scenes in heaven, offered themselves again almost like very revelations