resented is Eternity. The characters are God and all his Creatures.
And all these are exhibited in the clearest and most inevitable relation
with the main event, so that there is not an incident, hardly a line of
the poem, but leads backwards or forwards to those central lines in the
Ninth Book:--

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth-reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat.
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost.

From this point radiates a plot so immense in scope, that the history of
the world from the first preaching of the Gospel to the Millennium
occupies only some fifty lines of Milton's epilogue. And if the plot be
vast, the stage is large enough to set it forth. The size of Milton's
theatre gives to his imagination those colossal scenical opportunities
which are turned to such magnificent account. De Quincey enumerates some
of them--"Heaven opening to eject her rebellious children; the
unvoyageable depths of ancient Chaos, with its 'anarch old' and its
eternal war of wrecks; these traversed by that great leading Angel that
drew after him the third part of the heavenly host; earliest Paradise
dawning upon the warrior-angel out of this far-distant 'sea without
shore' of chaos; the dreadful phantoms of Sin and Death, prompted by
secret sympathy and snuffing the distant scent of 'mortal change on
earth,' chasing the steps of their great progenitor and sultan; finally
the heart-freezing visions, shown and narrated to Adam, of human misery
through vast successions of shadowy generations: all these scenical
opportunities offered in the _Paradise Lost_ become in the hands of the
mighty artist elements of undying grandeur not matched on earth."

All these grandeurs and beauties are as real and living to-day as they
were on the day when Milton conceived them. But the other advantage
claimed for his epic, that it deals with matters of the dearest concern
to all of us, has been sharply questioned. It was Mr. Pattison's
complaint of _Paradise Lost_ that in it "Milton has taken a scheme of
life for life itself," and that it requires a violent effort from the
modern reader to accommodate his conceptions to the anthropomorphic
theology of the poem. The world is now thickly peopled with men and women
who, having bestowed their patronage on other ancestors, care little
about Adam and Eve, and who therefore feel that Milton's poe