"Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven"; or-- "As ever in my great Task-Master's eye:" and for others as well as for himself such a hope as that which concludes his _At a Solemn Music_-- "O, may we soon again renew that song, And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long To his celestial concert us unite, To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light!" _Tu habe Deum prae oculis tuis_, says the author of _The Imitation_: "Have thou God {148} before Thine eyes." And so by his poetry and by his life says Milton. The influence of such a man, whatever the faults of his intellectual creed, can hardly on the whole have been anything but a good one, either on those who heard his living voice or on those who for two hundred years have caught what they may of it from the printed pages of his books. So much it seemed worth while to say in defence of Milton whose sins in these matters have always been exaggerated by his ecclesiastical and political opponents. But the effect, good or bad, which a great poem produces on opinion is a mere by-product: its essential business is nothing of that sort but the production in the minds of competent readers of the pleasure proper to a great work of the imagination. And this is the criterion by which the _Paradise Lost_, like every other work of the kind, must primarily be judged. The poem, as we have it, is the long delayed result of an intention formed in Milton's strangely ripe and resolute youth. Before he was thirty he spoke openly to his friends of writing a great poem which was, as he shortly afterwards had no hesitation in telling the public, to be of the sort that the world does not willingly let die. At first the subject was to have been the Arthurian legend which {149} poets of all ages have found so fruitful. But that was soon abandoned, apparently for the reason that a little examination of the authorities convinced the poet that it was not historically true. This fact has a literary as well as a biographical importance. Great artist as Milton was, he seems to have confused truth of art with truth of fact. He preferred a Biblical subject because it was his belief that every statement in the Bible was literally true. This belief, except from the emotional fervour it inspired in him, was a positive disadvantage to him as a poet. It circumscribed his freedom of invention, it compelled him to argue that the action of his drama as he found it was already reasonable and probable instead of letting his imagination work upon it and make it so; it made him aim too often at producing belief instead of delight in his hearers. This, of course, had obvious drawbacks as soon as people ceased to regard the first chapters of Genesis as a literal prose record of events which actually happened. For a hundred and fifty years many people read the _Paradise Lost_ and supposed themselves to be enjoying the poem when what they were really