ess pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality my sentence, and be earth
Insensible! how glad would lay me down
As in my mother's lap! There I should rest
And sleep secure;...

What is this, as Lord Latymer asks, but an echo of Job's words?--

For now should I have lien down and been quiet;
I should have slept; then had I been at rest:
With kings and counsellers of the earth,
Which built desolate places for themselves ...
There the wicked cease from troubling;
And there the weary be at rest.

There is no need for me to point out how exactly, though from two
nearly opposite angles, the story of Job would hit the philosophy
of Milton and the philosophy of Shelley to the very heart. What
is the story of the afflicted patriarch but a direct challenge to
a protestant like Milton (I use the word in its strict sense) to
justify the ways of God to man? It is the very purpose, in sum,
of the "Book of Job," as it is the very purpose, in sum, of
"Paradise Lost": and since both poems can only work out the
justification by long argumentative speeches, both poems
lamentably fail as real solutions of the difficulty. To this I
shall recur, and here merely observe that _qui s' excuse s'
accuse_: a God who can only explain himself by the help of
long-winded scolding, or of long-winded advocacy, though he employ
an archangel for advocate, has given away the half of his case by
the implicit admission that there are two sides to the question.
And when we have put aside the poetical ineptitude of a Creator
driven to apology, it remains that to Shelley the Jehovah who,
for a sort of wager, allowed Satan to torture Job merely for the
game of testing him, would be no better than any other tyrant;
would be a miscreant Creator, abominable as the Zeus of the
"Prometheus Unbound."

Now you may urge that Milton and Shelley dropped Job for hero
because both felt him to be a merely static figure: and that the
one chose Satan, the rebel angel, the other chose Prometheus the
rebel Titan, because both are active rebels, and as epic and
drama require action, each of these heroes makes the thing move;
that Satan and Prometheus are not passive sufferers like Job but
souls as quick and fiery as Byron's Lucifer:

Souls who dare use their immortality--
Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face, and tell him that
His evil is not good.

Very well, urge this: u