ther than poverty of
poetic ornament. The wealth is most profusely displayed in the books
treating of Satan and his followers, but it is not absent from Eden nor
from the empyreal Heaven, although in the one case the monotony of the
situation, and in the other the poet's evident anxiety to authorise his
every step from Scripture, prevent the full display of his power. But
Milton is a difficult poet to disable; he is often seen at his best on
the tritest theme, which he handles after his own grave fashion by
comprehensive statement, measured and appropriate, heightened by none
save the most obvious metaphors, and depending for almost all its charm
on the quiet colouring of the inevitable epithet, and the solemn music of
the cadence:--

Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied; for beast and bird
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale.
She all night long her amorous descant sung:
Silence was pleased. Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the Moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

Darkness, silence, rest, the nightingale's song, the stars, the rising of
the moon--these are all the material of this wonderful passage. Yet did
ever such beauty fall with night upon such peace, save in Paradise alone?

Once he had got his story, based on his few authorities, with hints
unconsciously taken and touches added, perhaps, from his reading of other
poets--of Caedmon, Andreini, and Vondel, of Spenser, Sylvester, Crashaw,
and the Fletchers--Milton's first task was to reduce it to the strict
relations of time and space. His blindness probably helped him by
relieving him from the hourly solicitations of the visible world, and
giving him a dark and vacant space in which to rear his geometric fabric.
Against this background the figures of his characters are outlined in
shapes of light, and in this vacancy he mapped out his local Heaven and
Hell.

Heaven, as Milton portrays it, is a plain of vast extent, diversified
with hills, valleys, woods and streams. In the Second Book he speaks of
it as--

Extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round;

in the Tenth Book it is determined, and is square. It