eaks more than once of the novelty of this
theme, the best-known allusion being the beautiful introduction to Book
IX., in which he describes his subject, that of the human sin and the
divine anger

"That brought into this World a world of woe,
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,
Death's harbinger:"

and contrasts it with those other sins and other angers on which Homer
and Virgil built their poems. But he is not afraid of the contrast: he
thinks it is all to his own advantage--

"Sad task! yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;
Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so long
Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son:
If answerable style I can obtain
Of my celestial Patroness who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse,
{153}
Since first this subject for heroic song
Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late,
Not sedulous by nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only argument
Heroic deemed--"

The whole passage is too long for quotation. Indeed, as we have
already had occasion to notice, it is one of the difficulties of
discussing Milton that quotation is almost always compelled to do him
an injury by giving less than the whole of any one of those
long-sustained flights of music in which he rises and falls, turns to
the left hand or the right, as his imagination leads him, but always on
unflagging wings of undoubted and easy security. But enough has been
quoted here to illustrate the poet's direct challenge of Homer and
Virgil in this matter of subject. He was perfectly well aware that he
was making an entirely new departure, not only from the subject of the
ancients but also, as is shown by his detailed condemnation of "tilting
furniture, emblazoned shields" and the rest, from those of such poets
as Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. He did it deliberately, with open eyes.
And there is no doubt that he was at least partly right. To this day
he and Dante, in their different ways, enjoy a common advantage {154}
over Homer, and still more over a poet mainly of fancy like Tasso, in
the fact that their subject, that of the meaning and destiny of human
life, is one in itself of profound and absorbing interest to all
thinking men and women. Even if their treatment of it be in some pa