No sooner had the Almighty ceased, but all The multitude of angels, with a shout Loud as from numbers without number, sweet As from blest 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 amarant and gold-- Immortal amarant, a flower which once In Paradise, fast by the tree of life, Began to bloom; but soon for man’s offence To Heaven removed, where first it grew, there grows, And flowers aloft, shading the fount of life, And where the river of bliss, through midst of Heaven, Rolls o’er Elysian flowers her amber stream. In 1671 Milton issued his last volume of poetry, which contained _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_. The former poem, which tells of Christ’s temptation and victory, is complementary to the earlier epic, and Milton hoped that it would surpass its predecessor. In this his hopes were dashed. It is briefer and poorer than _Paradise Lost_; it lacks the exalted imagination, the adornment, and the ornate rhythms of the earlier poem. There is little action, the characters are uninteresting, and the work approaches _Paradise Lost_ only in a few outstanding passages. _Samson Agonistes_, which tells of Samson’s death while a prisoner of the Philistines, has a curious interest, for in the Biblical hero Milton saw more than one resemblance to himself. In form the work has the strict unity of time, place, and action universal in Greek tragedy. In style it is bleak and bare, in places harsh and forbidding; but in several places Milton’s stubborn soul is wrung with pity and exalted by the hope that looks beyond. The speech of Samson’s father over his dead son is no inappropriate epitaph for Milton himself: Come, come, no time for lamentation now, Nor much more cause; Samson hath quit himself Like Samson, and heroically hath finished A life heroic, on his enemies Fully revenged, hath left them years of mourning, To himself and father’s house eternal fame; And, which is best and happiest yet, all this With God not parted from him, as was feared, But favouring and assisting to the end. Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble. =4. Features of his Poetry.= (_a_) _The Puritan Strain._ All through his life Milton’s religious fervor was unshaken. Even his enemies did not deny his sincerity. It is seen even in one of his earliest sonnets: All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye. It persists even to the end, when it runs deeper and darker. In _Paradise Lost_, for example, his chief motive is to “justify the ways of God to men.”