There was much else beside, of course. The sublime is very near the terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the hateful. Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an amiable or attractive figure. Still less so is Milton in those prose pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from the heights of heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous personalities. This is a disease from which our more amiable age seems at last to have delivered the world. But Milton has at least the excuse of a long and august tradition, from the days of Demosthenes, equally profuse of a patriotism as lofty and of personalities as {11} base as Milton's, to those of a whole line of the scholars of the Renaissance who lived with the noblest literature of the world and wrote of each other in the language of Billingsgate fishwives. So the sublimity of his life is wholly that of an irresistible will, set from the first on achieving great deeds and victoriously achieving them in defiance of adverse men and fates. But this is quite compatible with qualities the reverse of agreeable. It is the business of sublimity to compel amazed admiration, not to be a pleasant companion. Milton rejoicing over the tortures bishops will suffer in hell, Milton insulting Charles I, Milton playing the tyrant to his daughters, none of these are pleasant pictures. But such incidents, if perhaps unusually grim in the case of Milton, are apt to happen with Olympians. Experience shows that it is generally best to listen to their thunder from a certain distance. Such limitations must not be ignored. But neither must they be unduly pressed. The important thing about the sun is not its spots but its light and heat. No great poet in all history, with the possible exception of Dante, has so much heat as Milton. In prose and verse alike he burns and glows with fire. At its worst it is a fire of anger and pride, at {12} its best a fire of faith in liberty, justice, righteousness, God. Of the highest of all fires, the white flame of love, it has indeed little. Milton had no Beatrice to teach him how to show men the loveliness of the divine law, the beauty of holiness. He could describe the loss of Paradise and even its recovery, but its eternal bliss, the bliss of those who live in the presence of l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle,