"what transports thee so? An outside? fair no doubt and worthy well Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love; Not thy subjection. Weigh with her thyself; Then value. Oft-times nothing profits more Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right." {180} But, though in these last words Raphael entirely disappears in Milton, the poet who could conceive the panegyric to which Raphael replies, who could elsewhere make his hero say that he received "access in every virtue" from the looks of Eve, had assuredly no low ideal of what a woman may be. Adam speaks for him when he praises love as "not the lowest end of human life;" and he gives us a true corrective of the over-severe picture of Milton which half-knowledge is apt to draw when he goes on to declare that "not to irksome toil, but to delight, He made us, and delight to reason joined." But this is only one of many subjects on which Milton lets us hear his own voice speaking through his characters. We hear it when Satan cries to Beelzebub-- "Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering:" when Raphael reports Nisroch as saying of pain and pleasure what may well have been felt by the blind poet who owed his knowledge of pleasure to memory only, while he knew {181} pain by the frequent experience of one of the most painful of diseases-- "sense of pleasure we may well Spare out of life, perhaps, and not repine, But live content, which is the calmest life; But pain is perfect misery, the worst Of evils, and, excessive, overturns All patience:" we hear it when Adam, like a weary scholar, says that "not to know at large of things remote From use, obscure and subtle, but to know That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime wisdom;" when Raphael asks, like a Platonic philosopher, "what if Earth Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?" when Adam, like a doubting Christian in an age of speculation, hesitates for a moment about the efficacy of prayer-- "that from us aught should ascend to Heaven So prevalent as to concern the mind Of God high-blest, or to incline his will, Hard to belief may seem:" {182} and once more when Adam cries-- "solitude sometimes is best society," as if he, like the blind Milton, was worn out by twenty years of contending voices, and longed for the relief of silent and lonely thought.