artifice of contrast, noted by De Quincey as one of the
subtlest of Milton's devices, is illustrated, perhaps, by both these
passages. De Quincey instances neither, but chooses, as examples of the
way in which two images may act and react, heightening each other by
contrast--first, the use of architectural terms in describing Paradise;
next, the exhibition of a banquet in the desert in _Paradise
Regained_--"stimulating the sense of its utter solitude and remotion from
men and cities"; and, last and best, the comparison of Satan, in the same
poem, to an old man gathering sticks upon a winter's day. "The household
image of old age, of human infirmity, and of domestic hearths, are all
meant as a machinery for provoking and soliciting the fearful idea to
which they are placed in collision, and as so many repelling poles."

This is clever criticism and true philosophy. But the chief effect from
the more elaborate figures of this kind is to be found merely in the
reprieve and refreshment that they bring. There is a sense of pathos,
almost of tears, in being allowed, for one moment only, to taste reality
again, to revisit familiar scenes, before we are once more bound on the
slow wheel of unnatural events that is urged forward by the poet. Nothing
in Eden comes home to the feelings more directly than the simile used to
describe Satan as he watches Eve on the morning of the temptation--

As one who, long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight--
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound--
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look sums all delight:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery plot, the sweet recess of Eve.

The Serpent is glad to escape from Hell, to breathe the morning air of
Eden. But how glad we are to escape from Eden

To breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms!

There are no villages and farms in Eden, no smell of hay, no sheaves of
corn, no cottages, no roads, and no trace of that most human of symbols,
the thin blue scarf of smoke rising from a wayside encampment. Even when
we are privileged to assist at the first festal celebration of
hospitality