Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread

Wide on the wasteful Deep! With him enthroned
Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,

960

The consort of his reign; and by them stood

Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name

Of Demogorgon; Rumour next, and Chance,
And Tumult, and Confusion, all embroiled,
And Discord with a thousand various mouths.

To whom Satan, turning boldly, thus :- Ye Powers And Spirits of this nethermost Abyss,

Chaos and ancient Night, I come no spy
With purpose to explore or to disturb

The secrets of your realm; but, by constraint
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Lies through your spacious empire up to light,
Alone and without guide, half lost, I seek,

What readiest path leads where your gloomy bounds
Confine with Heaven; or, if some other place,
From your dominion won, the Ethereal King
Possesses lately, thither to arrive

970

980

I travel this profound. Direct my course:
Directed, no mean recompense it brings
To your behoof, if I that region lost,
All usurpation thence expelled, reduce
To her original darkness and your sway
(Which is my present journey), and once more
Erect the standard there of ancient Night.
Yours be the advantage all, mine the revenge!"
Thus Satan; and him thus the Anarch old,
With faltering speech and visage incomposed,
Answered :-"I know thee, stranger, who thou art— 990
That mighty leading Angel, who of late

Made head against Heaven's King, though overthrown.
I saw and heard; for such a numerous host

Fled not in silence through the frighted Deep,

With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,

Confusion worse confounded; and Heaven-gates
Poured out by millions her victorious bands,
Pursuing. I upon my frontiers here
Keep residence; if all I can will serve
That little which is left so to defend,

Encroached on still through our intestine broils
Weakening the sceptre of old Night: first, Hell,
Your dungeon, stretching far and wide beneath;
Now lately Heaven and Earth, another world
Hung o'er my realm, linked in a golden chain
To that side Heaven from whence your legions fell!
If that way be your walk, you have not far;
So much the nearer danger. Go, and speed;
Havoc, and spoil, and ruin, are my gain."

He ceased; and Satan staid not to reply,
But, glad that now his sea should find a shore,
With fresh alacrity and force renewed
Springs upward, like a pyramid of fire,

Into the wild expanse, and through the shock
Of fighting elements, on all sides round
Environed, wins his way; harder beset
And more endangered than when Argo passed
Through Bosporus betwixt the justling rocks,
Or when Ulysses on the larboard shunned
Charybdis, and by the other Whirlpool steered.
So he with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on. With difficulty and labour he;
But, he once passed, soon after, when Man fell,
Strange alteration! Sin and Death amain,
Following his track (such was the will of Heaven)
Paved after him a broad and beaten way

Over the dark Abyss, whose boiling gulf

Tamely endured a bridge of wondrous length,
From Hell continued, reaching the utmost Orb

1000

1010

1020

Of this frail World; by which the Spirits perverse 1030 With easy intercourse pass to and fro

To tempt or punish mortals, except whom
God and good Angels guard by special grace.

But now at last the sacred influence

Comm

Of light appears, and from the walls of Heaven
Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night
A glimmering dawn. Here Nature first begins
Her farthest yerge, and Chaos to retire,
As from her outmost works, a broken foe,
With tumult less and with less hostile din ;
That Satan with less toil, and now with ease,
Wafts on the calmer wave by dubious light,
And, like a weather-beaten vessel, holds
Gladly the port, though shrouds and tackle torn ;
Or in the emptier waste, resembling air,
Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold
Far off the empyreal Heaven, extended wide
In circuit, undetermined square or round,
With opal towers and battlements adorned
Of living sapphire, once his native seat,
And, fast by, hanging in a golden chain,
This pendent World, in bigness as a star
Of smallest magnitude close by the moon.
Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,
Accurst, and in a cursed hour, he hies.

1040

1050

THE END OF THE SECOND BOOK.

NOTES.

1. first disobedience. Until Adam sinned and disobeyed God man was without sin.

2. that forbidden tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit of which Adam and Eve were forbidden to taste. As forbid' in the active voice can govern two accusatives, one of the person, another of the thing, in the passive we may say either that a person is forbidden to do something, or, as here, that something is forbidden.

mortal taste, taste producing death. 'Mortal' is used in the same sense in the common phrase 'mortal wound.' See i. 766; ii. 729; and note on i. 266.

3. death. The whole human race was made liable to death in order to punish Adam and Eve for their act of disobedience.

4. loss of Eden. Adam and Eve were also, as a punishment for the same offence, driven out of the beautiful garden of Eden, in which they dwelt before their fall. In this line Eden means the garden of Eden; in the last line of the poem, and in iv. 210, Eden means the country in which the garden was situated. After Adam and Eve had been expelled from the garden of Eden they were still in the country of Eden.

one greater Man, Jesus Christ, who by His death on the cross atoned for the sin of the first man and obtained for the human race restoration to Paradise. Milton does not seem to think that the new Paradise will be identical with the old. See book xii. 463, where he does not decide whether the new blissful seat is to be in heaven or earth. It must be remembered that, though Christ by His life and death secured the eventual restoration of mankind to Paradise, the actual restoration will not be realized until the end of the world, when He will judge the world and receive the righteous into bliss. Therefore the present subjunctive 'restore, not the imperfect subjunctive, is used, because the restoration to Eden is still in the future as compared with the time at which Milton is writing. These words seem to suggest that the idea of writing a poem on the subject of Paradise

Regained, as the natural sequel to Paradise Lost, may have been present in Milton's mind long before Ellwood, after reading Paradise Lost through, said to him, 'Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?' 5. Regain for the human race the blissful seat, Paradise.

6. Sing, Heavenly Muse. In the opening lines of his two great epics Homer asks for inspiration from the Muse, the Greek goddess of poetry. All later epic poets are fond of imitating the practice of Homer, the father of epic poetry, and in this spirit of imitation Milton determines, like Homer, to begin with an invocation addressed to a Muse. Being a Christian he cannot ask for inspiration from one of the goddesses of Greek mythology, particularly as elsewhere he identifies the Greek deities with devils or fallen angels (see line 508). He therefore invents a new Muse, whom he supposes to have inspired Moses and the other sacred writers. Milton's Muse may be considered as a personification of divine inspiration. In the opening lines of book vii., borrowing, as Dante had done before him, the name of the Greek Muse of astronomy, he calls his Muse Urania (lit., 'the heavenly one'), and addresses her as a goddess, thereby adding a fourth person and perhaps a second deity to the three persons and one God of the Christian Trinity. It is difficult indeed for the poet to escape such inconsistencies when he attempts to combine Greek mythology with Christian theology.

7. The two names Sinai and Horeb, for so the word is usually spelt, are applied in the Bible to one and the same mountain, namely that on which Moses more than once received inspiration from God. See xii. 227; Exodus iii. 1; xix. 20. The conjunction or here shows that either Milton did not identify the two names, or possibly that, if he did so, he was doubtful which was the more suitable appellation. For a similar doubt see iii. 7. Horeb also means in the Bible a valley or district under Mount Horeb, in which sense the word is used in 1. 484.

Bentley very needlessly substituted the commonplace 'sacred' for 'secret.' The top of Sinai is called secret, because when Moses went there to receive God's commandments he went alone into a thick cloud, and the rest of the children of Israel were forbidden to approach.

8. That shepherd, Moses, who, before he was called by God to deliver Israel from the Egyptian yoke, 'kept the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian' (Exodus iii. 1). To him is ascribed the authorship of the first five books of the Bible, called the Pentateuch, in the opening verses of which we are told how in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth' (Genesis i. 1). Chaos, which prevailed everywhere before the creation of the world, is described in book ii. 890-915, and the creation is described in book vii.