The narrative of the Fall, delivered with an awful and a pathetic simplicity to us in a few words in the first chapter of Genesis, becomes accordingly the groundwork of the Poem; and these few words, with a few more scattered through the Scriptures, and barely hinting Celestial transactions, the War and Fall of the Angels, are by a genius, as daringly as powerfully creative, expanded into the mighty dimensions of an Epic. That unspeakable hope, foreshown to Adam as to be accomplished in distant generations, pouring an exhilarating beam upon the darkness of man's self-wrought destruction, which saves the catastrophe of the poem from utter despair, and which tranquillizes the sadness, has to be interwoven in the poet's narrative of the Fall. How stupendous the art that has disposed and ordered the immensity!--comprehended the complexity of the subject into a clearly harmonized, musically proportionate Whole! Unless the Paradise Lost had risen from the soul of Milton as a hymn--unless he had begun to sing as a worshipper with his hands uplifted before the altar of incense, the choice of the subject would have been more than bold--it would have been the daring of presumption--an act of impiety. For he will put in dialogue God the Father and God the Son--disclosing their supreme counsels. He has prayed to the Third Person of the Godhead for light and succour. If this were a fetch of human wit, it was in the austere zealot and puritan a mockery. To a devout Roman Catholic poet, we could forgive every thing. For nursed among legends and visual representations of the invisible--panoplied in a childlike imposed faith from the access of impiety--his paternoster and his ave-marie more familiar to his lips than his bread, almost so as their breath--the most audacious representations may come to him vividly and naturally, without a scruple and without a thought. But Milton, the purged, the chastened, a spiritual iconoclast, drinking his faith by his own thirst on the waters of Zion, a champion whose weapons from the armoury of God "are given him tempered"--he to holy things cannot lay other than an awful hand. We know that he believed himself under a peculiar guidance. Surely, he had had visions of glory which, when he designed the poem that would include scenes in heaven, offered themselves again almost like very revelations. If we hesitate in believing this of him, it is because we conceive in him a stern intellectual pride and strength, which could not easily kneel to adore. But there we should greatly err. For he recognized in himself-- "Self-knowing, and from thence Magnanimous to correspond with heaven"--