delighted the horrid shapes: Death grinned horrible a ghastly smile; and Sin unbarring the fateful works,

on a sudden open fly

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound

The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder.

She opened what only she could have moved; but to shut was
Wide open stood the gates for ever more,

beyond her power.

casting forth smoke and flame into the abyss.

Before their eyes in sudden view appear

The secrets of the hoary deep-a dark

Illimitable ocean, without bound,

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height,

And time, and place, are lost.

Into this wild abyss the wary fiend

Stood on the brink of hell, and looked awhile,

Pondering his voyage;

and then, spreading his dark wings, he rose upon the surging smoke, till this soon failing, he found himself in an enormous vacuum; and

all unawares,

Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour
Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance,
The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud,
Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him
As many miles aloft.

Then he finds himself on something that was neither substance nor vacuity, but over which he sped, half on foot and half-flying. Appalled by no change of circumstances,

so eagerly the fiend

O'er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way;
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

At length, led by a confusion of discordant sounds, he arrived at the dominions of Chaos, where Night sat enthroned with him, surrounded by numerous terrible shapes. To them Satan, as before, disclosed his errand, promising to return into their domain the newly-ordered world; and the old Anarch directed him with good-will.

At length the light of heaven began to dawn as he reached the frontiers of nature; and then

No. 8.

Satan, with less toil, and now with ease,

Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light,
And, like a weather-beaten vessel, holds
Gladly the port, though
rhi shrouds and tackle torn;
Or in the emptier waste, resembling air,

9

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 pendent world, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude, close by the moon.
Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he hies.

BOOK III.

Hail, holy light! offspring of heaven first-born;
Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam!

May I express thee unblamed? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity; dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Or hear'st thou rather, pure ethereal stream,
Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the sun,
Before the heavens thou wert; and at the voice
Of God, as with a mantle, didst invest
The rising world of waters, dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.
Thee I revisit now with bolder wing,

Escaped the Stygian pool, though long detained
In that obscure sojourn; while in my flight
Through utter and through middle darkness borne,
With other notes than to the Orphean lyre,

I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,

Taught by the heavenly muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare. Thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovereign vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander, where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallowed feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit: nor, sometimes, forget
Those other two, equalled with me in fate,
So were I equalled with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris, and blind Mæonides ;

And Tiresias, and Phineus, prophets old :
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid,
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair,

Presented with a universal blank

Of nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather thou, celestial light,

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

On his throne high above all height, the Almighty Father sat viewing his works. He beheld first our two first parents in their blissful solitude upon the new earth.

He then surveyed

Hell and the gulf between, and Satan there,
Coasting the wall of heaven, on this side night,
In the dun air sublime, and ready now

To stoop, with wearied wings and willing feet,
On the bare outside of this world, that seemed
Firm land imbosomed, without firmament;
Uncertain which, in ocean or in air.

Communing on these sights with his Almighty Son, who sat beside
him on the throne, the origin, the present, and the future of the
human race was shadowed forth; their miserable fall reviewed;
and the great scheme of redemption through divine love developed.
No sooner had the Almighty ceased, but all
The multitude of angels, with a shout,

Loud as from numbers without number, sweet
As from blessed voices, uttering joy; heaven rung
With jubilee, and loud hosannas filled
The eternal regions: lowly reverent,

Towards either throne they bow, and to the ground,
With solemn adoration, down they cast.

Their crowns, inwove with amaranth and gold.

While this went on in heaven, Satan stood viewing from afar the world he sought. It appeared through a path that opened into the universe (the path by which the angels of God descend and ascend) first like an orb, and then like a vast continent spread out

before him. Threading his way among innumerable spheres-the more distant stars to appearance, the nearer worlds he alighted upon the Sun and finding a glorious angel there the same who, in later days, was seen of John he assumed the form of a youthful cherub, and inquired the way to the earthly paradise; and receiving from Uriel the needful direction, he renewed his journey- brosos esfront oft an bus pornoa i avira 1.

and toward the coast of earth beneath,

Down from the ecliptic, sped with hoped success,

Throws his steep flight in many an airy wheel, mat
Nor stayed, till
d, till on Niphates top he lights,

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O for that warning voice, which he who saw
The Apocalypse heard cry in heaven aloud190.
on mankind.

For now came Satan to wreak his venge
not rejoicing in his speed, not bold and fearless as w
but conscience-stricken, and full of horror and despair.

But

when afar off,

O thou! that, with surpassing glory crowned,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the God
Of this new world; at whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminished heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
That bring to my remembrance from what state
fell, how glorious once above thy sphere.
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?e as dit zoud
Which way I fly is hell; myself am

768

hell;

And in the lowest deep, a lower deep, te

Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, to
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

T

But the fiend derives resolution even from despair. ́ ́All is lost; the day of reconcilement is past; and

So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou iny good; by thee, at least,
Divided empire with heaven's King I hold;

By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign;

As man erelong, and this new world, shall know,

Calming, therefore, his perturbation, and assuming an aspect of peace-though not successfully enough to deceive Uriel, whose eye had followed him down to the Assyrian mount

So on he fares, and to the border comes

Of Eden, where delicious Paradise,

Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green,

As with a rural mound, the champaign head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides,
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access denied; and overhead up grew
Insuperable height of loftiest shade,

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm,
A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre

Of stateliest view

Higher still appeared the wall of Paradise, and higher even than that a belt of trees laden at once with fruits and blossoms

On which the sun more glad impressed his beams,
Than on fair evening cloud, or humid bow,

When God hath showered the earth; so lovely seemed
That landscape: and of pure, now purer air,

Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires 1
Vernal delight and joy, able to drive

All sadness but despair. Now gentle gales,
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense
Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea, north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore

Of Araby the blessed; with such delay

"

Well pleased, they slack their course, and many a league,
Cheered with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles.

Satan did not stay long to inhale the sweets of this enchanting place, but with a single bound overleaped wall and grove, and alighted on his feet within.

So clomb this first grand thief into God's fold; /
Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life,

The middle tree, and highest there that grew,

Sat like a cormorant. 7,

From hence he viewed the whole area of Paradise, watered by the glorious fountain that ultimately divided into as many streams, which it is unnecessary here to distinguish

But rather to tell how, if art could tell,

How, from that sapphire fount, the crispèd brooks,
Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,

With mazy error, under pendent shades,

Ran

visiting each plant, and fed

121

Flowers, W
worthy of Paradise; which not nice art,
In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill, and dále, and plain,
Both where the morning sun first warmly smote
The open field, and where the unpierced shade
Imbrowned the noontide bowers.