[15] To this assertion I must make one exception. Since these remarks were written, my attention has been kindly drawn by Professor Campbell of St. Andrews to a passage in the ninth book of Paradise Lost, in which Milton for a moment reverts to the old rural freshness in something of the manner of his youth. It is the place where the Tempter first catches sight of Eve:—
“Much he the place admired, the person more.
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,