who with Saturn old
Fled over Adria to the Hesperian fields,
And o'er the Celtic roam'd the utmost isles.
Milton's knowledge was equal to every demand, and his were
the unconquerable will
And courage never to submit or yield.
But, magnificent as he is, Milton has always his eye on that Achæan "father of the rest," and he copies Homer's bridal-bed of Zeus and Hera
under foot the violet,
Crocus and hyacinth with rich inlay
Broidered the ground.
"And beneath them the divine earth sent forth fresh new grass, and dewy lotus, crocus, and hyacinth." But Milton gives twenty lines where Homer gives four.
In comparing the two greatest of epic poets—the first, Homer, with the last, Milton,—we observe that each sums up in himself the whole thought and experience, and the poetic expression of a world that lies behind him. Each "takes his own where he finds it," "makes all men's wit his own," as Ben Jonson said, in an invidious sense, of Shakespeare. Homer has his debts to old nameless poets; Milton displays his debts to Homer, and to Greek, Roman, and Celtic poets and historians, to Anglo-Saxons, Dutch, Italians, to all song and all learning, and all that he takes he transfigures, and rounds into a harmonious whole, the immortal Epic.
"Paradise Lost" was published in 1667, four years after Milton's third marriage. It is not apparent that he was in any danger from the Government of the Restoration. Charles II avowed to Clarendon, in a scribbled note now in the Bodleian, his constitutional dislike of hanging men. The book did not sell badly for a Puritan poem produced while the revel of the company of Comus was maddest, and, when Milton died, Dryden, the literary dictator, gave due praise to the greatest of literary epics, the loftiest, the most splendidly adorned; and poets of the eighteenth century adored the style which became ridiculous, or dull, in their imitations.
In "Paradise Regained," a sequel which Mr. Ellwood, a Quaker, reports himself to have suggested to Milton, the great qualities of the poet are unimpaired. His verse is that which he alone could wield. His sonorous catalogues, the music of names, the eagle glance over all the kingdoms of earth and the glory of them, the triumph of the pure spirit over carnal joys; nay the haunting memories of old romance,