poet a high place in the realm of imagination. Milton's Satan (so sings the poet),

with thoughts inflamed of highest design, Puts on swift wings, and toward the gates of Hell Explores his solitary flight: sometimes

He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left;
Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars
Up to the fiery concave towering high.

At last appear

Hell-bounds, high reaching to the horrid roof,

And thrice threefold the gates; three folds were brass, Three iron, three of adamantine rock,

Inpenetrable, impaled with circling fire,

Yet unconsumed.

Having appeased the Portress of Hell-gate,

On a sudden open fly,

With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,
The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder, that the lowest bottom shook
Of Erebus.

the gates wide open stood,

and like a furnace-mouth

Cast forth redounding smoke and ruddy flame.
Before their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary Deep-a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension.

Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend

Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage.

At last his sail-broad vans

He spreads for flight, and, in the surging smoke
Uplifted, spurns the ground.

O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,

And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

Having been guided by Chaos and ancient Night to where the Starry Universe is situated,

Satan staid not to reply,

But, glad that now his sea should find a shore,

With fresh alacrity and force renewed

Springs upward, like a pyramid of fire,

Into the wild expanse, and through the shock
Of fighting elements, on all sides round
Environed, wins his way.

But now at last the sacred influence

Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night

A glimmering dawn. Here Nature first begins
Her farthest verge, and Chaos to retire.

Satan with less toil, and now with ease, Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light,

Or in the emptier waste, resembling air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal Heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat,
And, fast by, hanging in a golden chain,
This pendant World, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.
Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurst, and in a cursed hour, he hies.

The remaining portion of the journey of the Fiend, from the opening at the zenith of the Starry Universe down through the Spheres, is passed over by Cadmon with little more than mere mention:

Arrived, at length, he trod with fiendish joy
The verdant paths of Man's primeval home,
Impatient now to prove his mission crowned
With dark success.

Milton's description, on the other hand, of Satan prowling around the huge circumference of the Universe in search of a port of entrance, and the picture of Satan's flight down through Starry Space, are so brilliant and so grandly portrayed, that we do not hesitate to give them virtually in extenso. Moreover, the careful perusal of this passage, will tend to fix more firmly in the mind what we have already said regarding the peculiar astronomical views of Paradise Lost: