Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was possible to escape, from the difficulties created for him by his acceptance of divine Persons as actors in his drama. But the escape could only be partial. It is true that as Johnson says, "whatever be done the poet is always great": but greatness of style often struggles in vain against the incongruity of a verbose and argumentative Deity. Such gods as Virgil's Venus and Juno may hurl rhetorical speeches at each other without much ill effect, but we feel that it was a lack of the sense of mystery in Milton that kept him from realizing that the one God, Creator, Father and Judge of all, cannot with fitness debate or argue: He can only decree. "Let thy words be few"; that is even truer, we {161} instinctively feel, of words put into His mouth than of words addressed to Him. Milton's God suffers even more than Shakspeare's Ghosts from a garrulity which destroys the sense of the awe properly belonging to a supernatural being; and the grim laughter of the Miltonic heaven is in its different way even more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the-box appearances and disappearances of the dead Hamlet and Banquo. Such are some of the difficulties, in part overcome by the poet and in part unperceived, inherent in the subject of _Paradise Lost_. One more, the greatest of all, remains. Poetry is a human art and its subject is human life. In the story Milton set himself to tell there are only two human figures; and how can they, living as they do in isolated perfection and sinlessness, without children or friends, without learning or art or business, without hopes or fears or memories, without the experience of disease or the expectation of death, and therefore without the joy, as we know it, of life and health, how can they provide material for a poem that can interest beings so utterly unlike them as ourselves? The answer is twofold. It is partly that they do fail to provide that material. The _Paradise Lost_ has in fact far less of ordinary human life in {162} it, far less variety of action, than the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. This was probably unavoidable but it was probably also Milton's deliberate intention. It was not his nature to care much about the small doings of ordinary people in everyday life. The line which he most often repeats in _Paradise Lost_ is the very opposite of those which are repeated so often in the _Iliad_, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, just doing their plain duty of linking two speeches or two paragraphs together: such as-- _hos oi men toiauta pros allelous agoreuon_ What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the other hand, one of his stateliest lines, the magnificent-- "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."