"The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven, What matter where, if I be still the same?"[7] "To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."[8] "...Who overcomes By force hath overcome but half his foe."[9] The effect of _Paradise Lost_ on English thought is more a resultant of the entire poem than of detached quotations. _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ have furnished as many current quotations as the whole of _Paradise Lost_. The Embodiment of High Ideals.---No poet has embodied in his verse higher ideals than Milton. When twenty-three, he wrote that he intended to use his talents-- "As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."[10] Milton's poetry is not universally popular. He deliberately selected his audience. These lines from _Comus_ show to whom he wished to speak:-- "Yet some there be that by due steps aspire To lay their just hands on that golden key That opes the palace of eternity. To such my errand is." He kept his promise of writing something which speaks for liberty and for nobility of soul and which the world would not willingly let die. His ideals react on us and raise us higher than we were. To him we may say with Wordsworth:-- "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free." [11] SUMMARY The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and political ideals. James I. and Charles I. trampled on the laws and persecuted the Puritans so rigorously that many of them fled to New England. Civil war, in which the Puritans triumphed, was the result. The Puritans, realizing that neither lands beyond the sea nor the New Learning could satisfy the aspirations of the soul, turned their attention to the life beyond. Bunyan's Pilgrim felt that the sole duty of life was to fight the forces of evil that would hold him captive in the City of Destruction and to travel in the straight and narrow path to the New Jerusalem. Life became a ceaseless battle of the right against the wrong. Hence, much of the literature in both poetry and prose is polemical. Milton's _Paradise Lost_ is an epic of war between good and evil. The book that had the most influence in molding the thought of the time was the King James (1611) version of the _Bible_. The minor prose deals with a variety of subjects. There are argumentative, philosophical, historical, biographical, and theological prose works; but only the fine presentation of nature and life in _The Complete Angler_ interests the general reader of to-day, although the grandeur of Milton's _Areopagitica_, the humor of Thomas Fuller, the stately rhythmical prose of Sir Thomas Browne, and the imagery and variety of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers.