ves us as if we had seen the Trojan hero
taking off his helmet to assuage the terrors of his infant son, and
heard the lamentations of his mother at parting with her husband. But
he does not lay bare the heart, with the terrible force of Dante, by a
line or a word. There is nothing in Homer which conveys so piercing an
idea of misery as the line in the _Inferno_, where the Florentine bard
assigns the reason of the lamentations of the spirits in Malebolge--

"Questi non hanno speranza di morte."

"These have not the _hope of death_." There speaks the spiritual poet;
he does not paint to the eye, he does not even convey character by the
words he makes then utter; he pierces by a single expression, at once
to the heart.

Milton strove to raise earth to heaven: Homer brought down heaven to
earth. The latter attempt was a much easier one than the former; it
was more consonant to human frailty; and, therefore, it has met with
more success. The gods and goddesses in the _Iliad_ are men and women,
endowed with human passions, affections, and desires, and
distinguished only from sublunary beings by superior power and the
gift of immortality. We are interested in them as we are in the genii
or magicians of an eastern romance. There is a sort of aerial epic
poem going on between earth and heaven. They take sides in the
terrestrial combat, and engage in the actual strife with the heroes
engaged in it. Mars and Venus were wounded by Diomede when combating
in the Trojan ranks; their blood, or rather the

"Ichor which blest immortals shed,"

flowed profusely; they fled howling to the palaces of heaven.
Enlightened by a spiritual faith, fraught with sublime ideas of the
divine nature and government, Milton was incomparably more just in his
descriptions of the Supreme Being, and more elevated in his picture of
the angels and arch-angels who carried on the strife in heaven; but he
frequently falls into metaphysical abstractions or theological
controversies, which detract from the interest of his poem.

Despite Milton's own opinion, the concurring voice of all subsequent
ages and countries has assigned to the _Paradise Regained_ a much
lower place than to the _Paradise Lost_. The reason is, that it is
less dramatic--it has less incident and action. Great part of the poem
is but an abstract theological debate between our Saviour and Satan.
The speeches he makes them utter are admirable, the reasoning is
close, the arguments coge