are still his.  The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames is qualified and made innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of inflicting infinite misery on others.  Yet Satan is not the principle of malignity, or of the abstract love of evil—­but of the abstract love of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate.  From this principle he never once flinches.  His love of power and contempt for suffering are never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity.  His thoughts burn like a hell within him; but the power of thought holds dominion in his mind over every other consideration.  The consciousness of a determined purpose, of “that intellectual being, those thoughts that wander through eternity,” though accompanied with endless pain, he prefers to nonentity, to “being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb of uncreated night.”  He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition in one line.  “Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or suffering!” After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he does more than this—­he founds a new empire in hell, and from it conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted flight, forcing his way through nether and surrounding fires.  The poet has not in all this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the magnitude of the conception.  The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct; the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a more terrific example of suffering and of crime.  Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, “rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air,” it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriate images:  so that we see it always before us, gigantic, irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed—­but dazzling in its faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god.  The deformity of Satan is only in the depravity of his will; he has no bodily deformity to excite our loathing or disgust.  The horns and tail are not there, poor emblems of the unbending, unconquered spirit, of the writhing agonies within.  Milton was too magnanimous and open an antagonist to support his argument by the bye-tricks of a hump and cloven foot; to bring into the fair field of controversy the good old catholic prejudices of which Tasso and Dante have availed themselves, and which the mystic German critics would restore.  He relied on the justice of his cause, and did not scruple to give the devil his due.  Some persons may think that he has carried his liberality too far, and injured the cause he professed to espouse by making him the chief person in his poem.  Considering the nature of his subject, he would be equally in danger of running into this fault, from his faith in religion, and his love of rebellion; and perhaps each of these motives had its full share in determining the choice of his subject.