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; 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 gates wide open stood, and like a furnace-mouth Cast forth redounding smoke and ruddy flame. Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while, At last his sail-broad vans He spreads for flight, and, in the surging smoke 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 But now at last the sacred influence Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven A glimmering dawn. Here Nature first begins Satan with less toil, and now with ease, Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light, Or in the emptier waste, resembling air, 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 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: |