Sprung from the bosom of heroic life, the Iliad asked heroic listeners. NORTH. See with what large-hearted love he draws the Men--Hector, and Priam, and Sarpedon--as well as the Woman Andromache--enemies! Can he so paint humanity and not humanise? He humanises _us_--who have literature and refined Greece and Rome--who have Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton--who are Christendom. SEWARD. He loves the inferior creatures, and the face of nature. NORTH. The Iliad has been called a Song of War. I see in it--a Song of Peace. Think of all the fiery Iliad ending in--Reconciled Submission! SEWARD. "Murder Impossibility," and believe that there might have been an Iliad or a Paradise Lost in Prose. NORTH. It could never have been, by human power, _our_ Paradise Lost. What would have become of the Seventh Book? This is now occupied with describing the Six Days of Creation. A few verses of the First Chapter of Genesis extended into so many hundred lines. The Book, as it stands, has full poetical reason. First, it has a sufficient motive. It founds the existence of Adam and Eve, which is otherwise not duly led to. The revolted Angels, you know, have fallen, and the Almighty will create a new race of worshippers to supply their place--Mankind. SEWARD. For this race that is to be created, a Home is previously to be built--or this World is to be created. NORTH. I initiated you into Milton nearly thirty years ago, my dear Seward; and I rejoice to find that you still have him by heart. Between the Fall of the Angels, and that inhabiting of Paradise by our first parents, which is largely related by Raphael, there would be in the history which the poem undertakes, an unfilled gap and blank without this book. The chain of events which is unrolled would be broken--interrupted--incomplete. SEWARD. And, sir, when Raphael has told the Rebellion and Fall of the Angels, Adam, with a natural movement of curiosity, asks of this "Divine Interpreter" how this frame of things began? NORTH. And Raphael answers by declaring at large the Purpose and the Manner. The Mission of Raphael is to strengthen, if it be practicable, the Human Pair in their obedience. To this end, how apt his discourse, showing how dear they are to the Universal Maker, how eminent in his Universe! SEWARD. The causes, then, of the Archangelic Narrative abound. And the personal interest with which the Two Auditors must hear such a revelation of wonders from such a Speaker, and that so intimately concerns themselves, falls nothing short of what Poetry justly requires in relations put into the mouth of the poetical Persons. NORTH. And can the interest--not now of Raphael's, but of Milton's "fit audience"--be sustained throughout? The answer is triumphant. The Book is, from beginning to end, a stream of the most beautiful descriptive Poetry that exists. Not however, mind you, Seward, of stationary description. SEWARD. Sir? NORTH.