English hall, with garden and park-it is a large undulating country as bold as beautiful; and as in hell he made Switzerland run fire, in Paradise he makes Britain flow with milk and honey. As the one was a wilderness of death, this is a wilderness of sweets. There are roses in it, but there are also forests. There are soft vales, but there are also mountains. There are rippling, dancing streams; but there is also a large, grave river, running south. There are birds singing on the branches; but there is also Behemoth reposing below. There is the lamb; but there is the lion too, even in his innocence awful. There is a bower in the midst; but there is a wall vast and high around. There are our happy parents within; but there are hosts of angels without. There is perfect happiness; but there is also, walking in the garden, and running amid the trees, a low whisper, prophesying of change, and casting a nameless gloom over all the region. Such is the Paradise of Milton. It is not that of Macaulay, whose description of it in "Byron," vivid as it is, gives us the idea rather of a beautiful, holy and guarded spot, than of a great space, forming a broad nuptial crown to the young world. In his Heaven, Milton finds still fuller field for the serious as well as sportive exercise of his unbounded imagination. He gives us the conception of a region immeasurably large. Many earths are massed together to form one continent surrounding the throne of God-a continent, not of cloud, or airy light, but of fixed solid land, with steadfast towering mountains, and soft slumbrous vales; to which Pollok, in his copy of it, has added, finely, wastes and wildernesses-retreats, even there, for solitary meditation; and it is a beautiful thought, that of there being hermits even in heaven. Afar, like a cloud, rises, the centre and pinnacle of the region, the throne of Jehovah, now bathed in intolerable light, and now shaded by profound darkness. Thus far imagination, sternly and soberly, accomplishes her work But then she describes the cave, whence, by turns, light and darkness issue--the artillery employed by the rebel angels -their punning speeches to each other-their tearing up mountains--the opening and closing of their wounds--she runs wild; nor is her wildness beautiful; it is the play rather of false than of true fancy--rather a recollection of the "Arabian Nights," than the carol and spring of a Titanic original faculty. The councils of the Godhead are proverbial for feebleness and prolixity. Milton's hand trembles as it takes down the syllables from the Divine lips; and he returns, with eager haste, to the consult, on the midnight Mount of the Congregation. But the coming forth of the Messiah to destroy his foes is the most sublime passage in the poem. It is a "torrent rapture" of fire. Its words do not run, but rush, as if hurrying from the chariot of the Son. They seem driven, even as the fiends are driven, before him. Suggested partly by Hesiod's "War of the Giants," and partly by Achilles coming forth upon the Trojans, it is su perior to both--indeed, to any thing in the compass of poetry. As the Messiah, in his progress, snatched up his fallen foes, and drove them before him like leaves on the blast, Milton, in the whirlwind of his inspiration, snatches up words, allusions, images, from Homer, Hesiod, and the Book of God, and bears them, in terror and in triumph, on. As soon call a tornado the plagiarist of the boughs, rafters, houses, and woods which it tears up, and carries forward in the fury of its power, as Milton, in a mood like this. To quote any part of it, were as wise as to preserve a little of the air of a hurricane. We must read it at a sitting-nay we cannot; for though sitting as we commence it, we will be standing up-`feet, hair, and soul-ere we are done. And would, we cry aloud, that the same pen of living fire had described for us that second and sublimer rising of the Son of man, when he shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels; which must now remain undescribed, till every eye shall see it, and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of it. Even so. Amen. The difficulty which met Milton in his portrait of our first parents was, obviously, to make them perfect, without being unnatural-to make them sinless, and yet distinguish them from angels-to show them human, yet unfallen; to make, in short, a new thing on the earth, a man and a woman, beautiful beyond desire, simple beyond disguise, graceful without consciousness, naked without shame, innocent but not insipid, lofty but not proud; uniting, in themselves, the qualities of childhood, manhood, and womanhood, as if, in one season, spring, summer, and autumn could be imagined. This was the task Milton had to accomplish; and, at his bidding, there arose the loveliest creatures of the human imagination, such as poet's eye never, before or since, imaged, in the rainbow or the moonshine, or saw in the light of dreams; than fairies more graceful, than the cherubim and the seraphim themselves more beautiful. It is the very image of God set in clay; and, in proportion to the baseness of the material, is the costliness and the masterdom of the work. "Oh, man! over all," we exclaim, “be thou blessed for ever. And thou, his sister and spouse, his softer self, man's moon and miniature, may every flower be thy lover, every bird thy morning and evening songstress; may the day be but thy sunny mantle, and the stars of night seem but gems in thy flowing hair!" Milton's Adam is, himself, as he was in his young manhood, ere yet the cares of life had ploughed his forehead or quenched his serene eyes. Eve, again, is Milton's life-long dream of what woman was, and yet may be--a dream, from which he again and again awoke, weeping, because the bright vision had passed away, and a cold reality alone remained. You see, in her every lineament, that he was one who, from the loftiness of his ideal, had been disappointed in woman. In the words, frequently repeated as a specimen of a bull 66 Adam, the goodliest man of men, since born he has unwittingly described the process by which his mind created them. Adam is the goodliest of his sons, because he is formed from them, by combining their better qualities; and thus are the children the parents of their father. Eve is the fairest of her daughters; for it would require the collected essence of all their excellences to form such another Eve. How beautiful the following words of Thomas Aird! "Lo! now the general father and mother! What a broad, ripe, serene, and gracious composure of love about them! O! could but that mother of us all be permitted to make a pilgrimage over the earth, to see her many sons and daughters! How kindly would the kings and queens of the world entreat her in their palaces! How affectionately would her outcast children of the wilderness give her honey and milk, and wash her feet! No thought of the many woes she brought upon us! No reproaches! Nothing but love! So generous is the great soul of this world!" Let the world, however, take comfort. If Eve has not accomplished such a pleasant peregrination (not so pleasant, by the way, for her to pass through such infernal nurseries as the "high viced" cities and reeking battle-fields of the earth), her picture and her lord's have visited some millions of her children, who have shown their affection for her by admiring two of the most monstrous of that progeny which French affectation and self-conceit, mistaking the pressure of nightmare for the stoop of the god, have ever produced. Approach, ye admirers of Milton's matchless pair, and see them translated into French, and tell us whether you think Monsieur Adam-himself a proof (were he a portrait) that the species did not need two progenitors, being as much a black as a white; or Madame Eve, smacking more of the Palais Royal than of Paradise-the first man and woman or the last man and woman—the first noble beginning, or the last meretricious and degraded end of their species? Such artificial beings, you feel, are quite secure. They cannot fall: they are fallen already, and too far ever to arise. One is reminded of the words of Shakspeare:-" If Adam fell in his innocency, no wonder though John Falstaff fall in his sin." We cease to wonder at their fall, and humbly think that that of Sir John, in the gutter before the Boar's Head, Eastcheap, might as soon have provoked the fantastic and forced symptoms of nature's sympathy with which the " Expulsion" abounds. Milton's management of his angels and devils proves as much as any thing in the poem the versatility of his genius, the delicacy of his discrimination of character, that Shakspearean quality in him which has been so much overlooked. To break up the general angel or devil element into so many finely-individualized forms-to fit the language to the character of each-to do this, in spite of the dignified and somewhat unwieldy character of his style-to avoid insipidity of excellence in his seraphs, and insipidity of horror in his fiends to keep them erect and undwindled, whether in the presence of Satan on the one side, or of Messiah on the other —was a problem requiring skill as well as daring, dramatic as well as epic powers. No mere mannerist could have succeeded in it. Yet, what vivid portraits has he drawn of Michael, Raphael, (how like, in their difference from each other, as well as in their names, to the two great Italian painters!) Abdiel, Uriel, Beelzebub, Moloch, Belial, Mammon-all perfectly distinct-all speaking a leviathan language, which, in all, however, is modified by the character of each, and in none sinks into mannerism. If Milton had not been the greatest of epic poets, he might have been the second of dramatists. Macaulay has admirably shown how, or rather that Shakspeare has preserved the distinction between similar characters, such as Hotspur and Falconbridge; and conceded even to Madame d'Arblay a portion of the same power, in depicting several individuals, all young, all clever, all clergymen, all in love, and yet all unlike each other. But Milton has performed a much more difficult achievement. He has represented five devils, all fallen, all eloquent, all in torment, hate, and hell, and yet all so distinct that you could with difficulty interchange a line of the utterances of each. None but Satan, the incarnation of egotism, could have said "What matter where, if I be still the same?" None but Moloch-the rash and desperate-could thus abruptly have broken silence- "My sentence is for open war." None but Belial-the subtle, far-revolving fiend, could have spoken of "Those thoughts that wander through eternity." None but Mammon, the down-looking demon, would ever, alluding to the subterranean riches of hell, have asked the question "What can heaven show more?" Or, who but Beelzebub, the Metternich of Pandemonium, would have commenced his oration with such grave, terrific irony as- "Thrones, and imperial powers, offspring of heaven, |