has made Greece dear to humanity—­these are the shining peaks of the regained “Paradise,” marvels of art and eloquence, yet, unlike “Paradise Lost,” beautiful rather than awful.  The faults inherent in the theme cannot be imputed to the poet.  No human skill could make the second Adam as great an object of sympathy as the first:  it is enough, and it is wonderful, that spotless virtue should be so entirely exempt from formality and dulness.  The baffled Satan, beaten at his own weapons, is necessarily a much less interesting personage than the heroic adventurer of “Paradise Lost.”  Milton has done what can be done by softening Satan’s reprobate mood with exquisite strokes of pathos:—­

                        “Though I have lost
    Much lustre of my native brightness, lost
    To be beloved of God, I have not lost
    To love, at least contemplate and admire
    What I see excellent in good or fair,
    Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense.”

These words, though spoken with a deceitful intention, express a truth.  Milton’s Satan is a long way from Goethe’s Mephistopheles.  Profound, too, is the pathos of—­

   “I would be at the worst, worst is my best,
    My harbour, and my ultimate repose.”

The general sobriety of the style of “Paradise Regained” is a fertile theme for the critics.  It is, indeed, carried to the verge of baldness; frigidity, used by Pattison, is too strong a word.  This does not seem to be any token of a decay of poetical power.  As writers advance in life their characteristics usually grow upon them, and develop into mannerisms.  In “Paradise Regained,” and yet more markedly in “Samson Agonistes,” Milton seems to have prided himself on showing how independent he could be of the ordinary poetical stock-in-trade.  Except in his splendid episodical descriptions he seeks to impress by the massy substance of his verse.  It is a great proof of the essentially poetical quality of his mind that though he thus often becomes jejune, he is never prosaic.  He is ever unmistakably the poet, even when his beauties are rather those of the orator or the moralist.  The following sound remark, for instance, would not have been poetry in Pope; it is poetry in Milton:—­

                              “Who reads
    Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
    A spirit and judgment equal or superior
    (And what he brings what need he elsewhere seek?)
    Uncertain and unsettled still remains? 
    Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.”

Perhaps, too, the sparse flowers of pure poetry are more exquisite from their contrast with the general austerity:—­

“The field, all iron, cast a gleaming brown.”

                                    “Morning fair
    Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray.”

Poetic magic these, and Milton is still Milton.