"But to know That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime wisdom: what is more, is fume, Or emptiness, or fond impertinence; And renders us, in things that most concern, Unpracticed, unprepared, and still to seek."[195] The angel gone, Eve, dissatisfied with her garden, wishes to have it improved, and proposes to her husband to work in it, she on one side, he on the other. He says, with an approving smile: "Nothing lovelier can be found In woman, than to study household good, And good works in her husband to promote."[196] But he fears for her, and would keep her at his side. She rebels with a little prick of proud vanity, like a young lady who mayn't go out by herself. She has her way, goes alone and eats the apple. Here interminable speeches come down on the reader, as numerous and cold as winter showers. The speeches of Parliament after Pride's Purge were hardly heavier. The serpent seduces Eve by a collection of arguments worthy of the punctilious Chillingworth, and then the syllogistic mist enters her poor brain: "His forbidding Commends thee more, while it infers the good By thee communicated, and our want: For good unknown sure is not had; or, had And yet unknown, is as not had at all.... Such prohibitions bind not."[197] Eve is from Oxford too, has also learned law in the inns about the Temple, and wears, like her husband, the doctor's trencher-cap. The flow of dissertations never ceases, from Paradise it gets into heaven: neither heaven nor earth, nor hell itself, would swamp it. Of all characters which man could bring upon the scene, God is the finest. The cosmogonies of peoples are sublime poems, and the artist's genius does not attain perfection until it is sustained by such conceptions. The Hindoo sacred poems, the Biblical prophecies, the Edda, the Olympus of Hesiod and Homer, the visions of Dante, are glowing flowers from which a whole civilization blooms, and every emotion vanishes before the terrible feeling through which they have leaped from the bottom of our heart. Nothing then can be more depressing than the degradation of these noble ideas, settling into the regularity of formulas, and under the discipline of a popular worship. What is smaller than a god sunk to the level of a king and a man, what more repulsive than the Hebrew Jehovah, defined by theological pedantry, governed in his actions by the last manual of doctrine, petrified by literal interpretation?