f-will personified, to which last principle
all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. From this
principle he never once flinches. His love of power and contempt for
suffering are never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity.
His thoughts burn like a hell within him; but the power of thought holds
dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness
of a determined purpose, of "that intellectual being, those thoughts
that wander through eternity," though accompanied with endless pain, he
prefers to nonentity, to "being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb
of uncreated night." He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition
in one line. "Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or
suffering!" After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat
in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he
does more than this--he founds a new empire in hell, and from it
conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted flight, forcing
his way through nether and surrounding fires. The poet has not in all
this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the
magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct;
the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a
more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of
Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, "rising aloft incumbent
on the dusky air," it is illustrated with the most striking and
appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic,
irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed--but dazzling in its
faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god. The deformity of Satan is
only in the depravity of his will; he has no bodily deformity to excite
our loathing or disgust. The horns and tail are not there, poor emblems
of the unbending, unconquered spirit, of the writhing agonies within.
Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his
argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot; to bring into the
fair field of controversy the good old catholic prejudices of which
Tasso and Dante have availed themselves, and which the mystic German
critics would restore. He relied on the justice of his cause, and did
not scruple to give the devil his due. Some persons may think that he
has carried his liberality too far, and injured the cause he professed
to espouse by making him the chief p