deepest and gravest necessity: the necessity of keeping his poem emphatically an affair of recognizable _human_ events. It is of man, and man's purpose in the world, that the epic poet has to sing; not of the purpose of gods. The gods must only illustrate man's destiny; and they must be kept within the bounds of beautiful illustration. But it requires a finer genius than most epic poets have possessed, to keep supernatural machinery just sufficiently fanciful without missing its function. Perhaps only Homer and Virgil have done that perfectly. Milton's revolutionary development marks a crisis in the general process of epic so important, that it can only be discussed when that process is considered, in the following chapter, as a whole. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: Such as similes and episodes. It is as if a man were to say, the essential thing about a bridge is that it should be painted.] IV. THE EPIC SERIES By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made. But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series--though not in exact repetition. Thus, the Homeric poems, the _Argonautica_, the _Aeneid_, the _Pharsalia_, and the later Latin epics, form one series: the _Aeneid_ would be the climax of the series, which thence declines, were it not that the whole originates with the incomparable genius of Homer--a fact which makes it seem to decline from start to finish. Then the process begins again, and again fulfils itself, in the series which goes from _Beowulf_, the _Song of Roland_, and the _Nibelungenlied_, through Camoens and Tasso up to Milton. And in this case Milton is plainly the climax. There is nothing like _Paradise Lost_ in the preceding poems, and epic poetry has done nothing since but decline from that towering glory.