But Adam and Eve, Milton is careful to explain, were not ritualists. They recite their evening hymn of praise as they stand at the entrance to their shady lodge:-- This said unanimous, and other rites Observing none, but adoration pure Which God likes best, into their inmost bower Handed they went. The traits of Milton's Puritanism peep out at unexpected places in the poem. The happy Garden, Adam is told, will be destroyed after the Flood, for a reason that would have been approved by the image-breakers of the Commonwealth:-- To teach thee that God attributes to place No sanctity, if none be thither brought By men who there frequent, or therein dwell. The palace of Pandemonium is built by Satan's host in an hour, whence men may Learn how their greatest monuments of fame, And strength, and art, are easily outdone By spirits reprobate; --a perfectly sound moral, well illustrating Mr. Swinburne's remark that Puritanism has nothing to do with Art, and that the great Puritans and the great artists have never confused them. Milton must also have been drawn to the theme of _Paradise Lost_ by the scope it promised for scenes of quiet natural beauty:-- All that bowery loneliness, The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring And bloom profuse and cedar arches. His imagination was so susceptible to a touch of beauty that even in the bare sketch he has left for a drama dealing with the story of Lot and his escape from Sodom we see how likely he was, here also, to fall into the error of _Comus_. As Lot entertains the angels at supper, "the Gallantry of the town passe by in Procession, with musick and song, to the temple of Venus Urania." The opening Chorus is to relate the course of the city, "each evening every one with mistresse, or Ganymed, gitterning along the streets, or solacing on the banks of Jordan, or down the stream." But in the story of the Garden of Eden the beauty was, for once, on the side of the morality; innocence and purity might be depicted, not, as in a fallen world, clad in complete steel, but at ease in their native haunts, surrounded by all the inexhaustible bounty of an unsubdued and uncorrupted Nature.