"she plucked, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
That all was lost."
So he suspends the flow of the richest and most elaborate of his similes by the slow-moving monosyllables of
"which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world:"
So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all politics, of his debate in hell:
"And that must end us; that must be our cure—
To be no more:"
So again he closes the first Act of Paradise Regained with a verse of solitary awe—
"And now wild beasts come forth the woods to roam."
{168}
But to return to the similes. Milton uses them, as we have seen, to introduce things familiar and contemporary into the remote and majestic theme of his poem. But he also uses them to introduce the whole world into Eden, all later history into the beginning of the world, all the varied glories of art and war, poetry and legend, with which his memory was stored, into an action which was only partly human and provided no scope at all for any human activities except of the most primitive order. So the palace of Hell is, he tells us, something far beyond the magnificence of "Babylon, or great Alcairo"; and the army of rebel angels far exceeds those
"That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side
Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther's son,
Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
And all who since, baptized or infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco or Trebisond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabbia."