justly adds that
Milton's blindness helped him "by having already converted all external
space in his own sensations into an infinite of circumambient blackness
through which he could flash brilliance at his pleasure." His
inclination as a thinker is evidently towards the Copernican theory, but
he saw that the Ptolemaic, however inferior in sublimity, was better
adapted to the purpose of a poem requiring a definite theatre of action.
For rapturous contemplation of the glory of God in nature, the
Copernican system is immeasurably the more stimulating to the spirit,
but when made the theatre of an action the universe fatigues with its
infinitude--

"Millions have meaning; after this
Cyphers forget the integer."

An infinite sidereal universe would have stultified the noble
description how Satan--

"In the emptier waste, resembling air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat;
And fast by, hanging in a golden chain,
This pendant world, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon."

This pendant world, observe, is not the earth, as Addison understood it,
but the entire sidereal universe, depicted not as the infinity we now
know it to be, but as a definite object, so insulated in the vastness of
space as to be perceptible to the distant Fiend as a minute star, and no
larger in comparison with the courts of Heaven--themselves not wholly
seen--than such a twinkler matched with the full-orbed moon. Such a
representation, if it diminishes the grandeur of the universe accessible
to sense, exalts that of the supersensual and extramundane regions where
the action takes its birth, and where Milton's gigantic imagination is
most perfectly at home.

There is no such compromise between religious creeds in Milton's mind as
he saw good to make between Ptolemy and Copernicus. The matter was, in
his estimation, far too serious. Never was there a more unaccountable
misstatement than Ruskin's, that "Paradise Lost" is a poem in which
every artifice of invention is consciously employed--not a single fact
being conceived as tenable by any living faith. Milton undoubtedly
believed most fully in the actual existence of all his chief personages,
natural and supernatural, and was sure that, however he mi