...  Him the Almighty power,

Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal power,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent in arms.

And when a lesser spirit falls, what a sad AEolian melody describes the downward flight: 

                   ...  How he fell

From Heaven they fabled thrown by angry Jove,
Sheer o’er the crystal battlements:  from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve
A summer’s day; and with the setting sun,
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.

The heavenly colloquies to which we have alluded between the Father and the Son, involve questions of theology, and present peculiar views—­such as the subordination of the Son, and the relative unimportance of the third Person of the Blessed Trinity.  They establish Milton’s Arianism almost as completely as his Treatise on Christian Doctrine.

HIS FAULTS.—­Grand, far above all human efforts, his poems fail in these representations.  God is a spirit; he is here presented as a body, and that by an uninspired pen.  The poet has not been able to carry us up to those infinite heights, and so his attempt only ends in a humanitarian philosophy:  he has been obliged to lower the whole heavenly hierarchy to bring it within the scope of our objective comprehension.  He blinds our poor eyes by the dazzling effulgence of that light which is

    ... of the Eternal co-eternal beam.

And it must be asserted that in this attempt Milton has done injury to the cause of religion, however much he has vindicated the power of the human intellect and the compass of the human imagination.  He has made sensuous that which was entirely spiritual, and has attempted with finite powers to realize the Infinite.

The fault is not so great when he delineates created intelligences, ranging from the highest seraph to him who was only “less than archangel ruined.”  We gaze, unreproved by conscience, at the rapid rise of Pandemonium; we watch with eager interest the hellish crew as they “open into the hill a spacious wound, and dig out ribs of gold.”  We admire the fabric which springs

       ... like an exhalation, with the sound
    Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet.

Nothing can be grander or more articulately realized than that arched roof, from which,

    Pendent by subtle magic, many a row
    Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed
    With naphtha and asphaltus, yields the light
    As from a sky.

It is an illustrative criticism that while the painter’s art has seized these scenes, not one has dared to attempt his heavenly descriptions with the pencil.  Art is less bold or more reverent than poetry, and rebukes the poet.