“Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat
      Was fair Damascus, on the fertile banks
      Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams.”

The word lucid here gives to the idea all the sparkling effect of the most perfect landscape.

And again: 

      “As when a vulture on Imaus bred,
      Whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,
      Dislodging from a region scarce of prey,
      To gorge the flesh of lambs and yeanling kids
      On hills where flocks are fed, flies towards the springs
      Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams;
      But in his way lights on the barren plains
      Of Sericana, where Chineses [sic] drive
      With sails and wind their cany waggons light.”

If Milton had taken a journey for the express purpose, he could not have described this scenery and mode of life better.  Such passages are like demonstrations of natural history.  Instances might be multiplied without end.

We might be tempted to suppose that the vividness with which he describes visible objects, was owing to their having acquired an unusual degree of strength in his mind, after the privation of his sight; but we find the same palpableness and truth in the descriptions which occur in his early poems.  In Lycidas he speaks of “the great vision of the guarded mount,” with that preternatural weight of impression with which it would present itself suddenly to “the pilot of some small night-foundered skiff”:  and the lines in the Penseroso, describing “the wandering moon,”

      “Riding near her highest noon,
      Like one that had been led astray
      Through the heaven’s wide pathless way,”

are as if he had gazed himself blind in looking at her.  There is also the same depth of impression in his descriptions of the objects of all the different senses, whether colours, or sounds, or smells—­the same absorption of his mind in whatever engaged his attention at the time.  It has been indeed objected to Milton, by a common perversity of criticism, that his ideas were musical rather than picturesque, as if because they were in the highest degree musical, they must be (to keep the sage critical balance even, and to allow no one man to possess two qualities at the same time) proportionably deficient in other respects.  But Milton’s poetry is not cast in any such narrow, common-place mould; it is not so barren of resources.  His worship of the Muse was not so simple or confined.  A sound arises “like a steam of rich distilled perfumes”; we hear the pealing organ, but the incense on the altars is also there, and the statues of the gods are ranged around!  The ear indeed predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately affected, and because the language of music blends more immediately with, and forms a more natural accompaniment to, the variable and indefinite associations of ideas conveyed by words.  But where the associations of the imagination are not the principal thing, the individual object is given by Milton with equal force and beauty.  The strongest and best proof of this, as a characteristic power of his mind, is, that the persons of Adam and Eve, of Satan, &c. are always accompanied, in our imagination, with the grandeur of the naked figure; they convey to us the ideas of sculpture.  As an instance, take the following: