Eighteen years had elapsed since Milton, just settled in London after his return from Italy, had first fastened on the subject, preferred it by a sure instinct to all the others that occurred in competition with it, and sketched four plans for its treatment in the form of a sacred tragedy, one with the precise title Paradise Lost, and another with the title Adam Unparadised (Vol.  II. pp. 106-108, and 115-119).  Through all the distractions of those eighteen years the grand subject had not ceased to haunt him, nor the longing to return to it and to his poetic vocation.  Nay there had hung in his memory all this while certain lines he had actually written and destined for the opening of the intended tragedy.  They were the ten lines that now form lines 32-41 of the fourth book of our present Paradise Lost.  He had imagined, for the opening of his tragedy, Satan already arrived within our Universe out of Hell, and alighted on our central Earth near Eden, and gazing up to Heaven and the Sun blazing there in meridian splendour.  He had imagined Satan, in this pause of his first advent into the Universe he was to ruin, thus addressing the Sun as its chief visible representative:—­

  “O thou that with surpassing glory crowned,
  Look’st from thy sole dominion like the god
  Of this new World,—­at whose sight all the stars
  Hide their diminished heads,—­to thee I call,
  But with no friendly voice, and add thy name,
  O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams,
  That bring to my remembrance from what state
  I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
  Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
  Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King!”

And now, after eighteen years, the poem having been resumed, but with the resolution, made natural by Milton’s literary observations and experiences in the interval, that the dramatic form should be abandoned and the epic substituted, these ten lines, written originally for the opening of the Drama, were to be the nucleus of the Epic.[1] With our present Paradise Lost before us, we can see the very process of the gradual reinvention.  In the epic Satan must not appear, as had been proposed in the drama, at once on our earth or within our universe.  He must be fetched from the transcendental regions, the vast extra-mundane spaces, of his own prior existence and history.  And so, round our fair universe, newly-created and wheeling softly on its axle, conscious as yet of no evil, conscious only of the happy earth and sweet human life in the midst, and of the steady diurnal change from day and light-blue sunshine into spangled and deep-blue night, Milton was figuring and mapping out those other infinitudes which outlay and encircled his conception of all this mere Mundane Creation.  Deep down beneath this MUNDANE CREATION, and far separated from it, he was seeing the HELL from which was to come its woe; all round the Mundane