in two lines:--

Cherub and Seraph rolling in the flood
With scattered arms and ensigns.

And the picture of the East rises at a touch:--

Dusk faces with white silken turbants wreathed.

In the drawing of single attitudes Milton studies the same large decorum
and majesty. He is never tempted into detail in the describing of gesture
or action; never loses the whole in the part. The bulk of _Paradise Lost_
was written between the sixth and the thirteenth years of his blindness.
Since the veil had fallen he had lived with the luminous shapes that he
could picture against the dark. The human face had lost, in his
recollection of it, something of its minuter delineation, but nothing of
its radiance. On the other hand, the human figure, in its most
significant gestures and larger movements, haunted his visions. His
description of the appearance of the wife whom he had never seen is an
early model of many of his later drawings. She comes to his bedside and
leans over him, stretching forth her arms:

Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.

Adam and Eve, as they are first seen in Paradise, have the same shining
quality, the same vagueness of beauty expressing itself in purely
emotional terms. Satan standing on the top of Mount Niphates, looking
down on Eden spread out at his feet, and then with fierce gesticulation
addressing himself to the sun at the zenith, is one of the dim solitary
figures that dwell in the mind's eye. No less impressive and no less
indefinite are those two monumental descriptions of the rebel leader; the
first, of his going forth to war in Heaven:--

High in the midst, exalted as a God,
The Apostate in his sun-bright chariot sat,
Idol of majesty divine, enclosed
With flaming Cherubim and golden shields.

and the other, of his encounter with Gabriel:--

Satan, alarmed,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved:
His stature reached the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horror plumed; nor wanted in his grasp
What seemed both spear and shield.

In these, and in a hundred other notable passages, the images are as
simple and broad as the emotional effects that they produce,--the sun,
flame, gold, a mountain, the sky.

Some of the scenes and situations delineated by Milton are of a gentler
and more elusive virtue than these te