to be confined,
representing only dramatically by means of speeches and choruses
those transactions in the three extramundane Infinitudes that might
bear on the terrestrial story. It must dare also into those
infinitudes themselves, pursue among them the vaster and more general
story of Satan's rebellion and fall, and yet make all converge,
through Satan's scheme in Hell and his advent at last into our World,
upon that one catastrophe of the ruin of infant Mankind which the
title of the poem proclaimed as the particular theme.

[Footnote 1: Phillips's words in quoting these lines are, "In the
Fourth Book of the Poem there are six [he says _six_, but quotes
all the _ten_] verses which, several years before the Poem was
begun, were shown to me and some others as designed for the very
beginning of the said Tragedy." These words, if the Epic was begun in
1658, might carry us back at farthest to about 1650 as the date when
the ten lines were in existence; but, besides that Phillips's
expression is vague, we have Aubrey's words in 1680 as follows:--"In
the [4th] Book of _Paradise Lost_ there are about six verses of
Satan's exclamation to the Sun which Mr. E. Phi. remembers about
fifteen or sixteen years before ever his Poem was thought of; which
verses were intended for the beginning of a Tragoedie, which he had
designed, but was diverted from it by other business." This, on
Phillips's own authority, would take the lines back to 1642 or
1643; and that, on independent grounds, is the probable date.
Hardly after 1642 or 1643 can Milton have adhered to his original
intention of writing _Paradise Lost_ in a dramatic form.]

"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse"--

Such might be the simple invocation at the outset; but, knowing now
all that the epic was really to involve, and how far it was to carry
him in flight above the Aonian Mount, little wonder that he could
already promise in it

"Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."

It may have been in one of the nights following a day of such
meditation of the great subject he had resumed, and some considerable
instalment of the actual verse of the poem as we now have it may have
been already on paper, or in Milton's memory for repetition to
himself, when he dreamt