It is true that the reply of the Angel moderating these ardours is more evidently Miltonic—
"what transports thee so?
An outside? fair no doubt and worthy well
Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love;
Not thy subjection. Weigh with her thyself;
Then value. Oft-times nothing profits more
Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right."
{180} But, though in these last words Raphael entirely disappears in Milton, the poet who could conceive the panegyric to which Raphael replies, who could elsewhere make his hero say that he received "access in every virtue" from the looks of Eve, had assuredly no low ideal of what a woman may be. Adam speaks for him when he praises love as
"not the lowest end of human life;"
and he gives us a true corrective of the over-severe picture of Milton which half-knowledge is apt to draw when he goes on to declare that
"not to irksome toil, but to delight,
He made us, and delight to reason joined."
But this is only one of many subjects on which Milton lets us hear his own voice speaking through his characters. We hear it when Satan cries to Beelzebub—
"Fallen Cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering:"
when Raphael reports Nisroch as saying of pain and pleasure what may well have been felt by the blind poet who owed his knowledge of pleasure to memory only, while he knew {181} pain by the frequent experience of one of the most painful of diseases—
"sense of pleasure we may well
Spare out of life, perhaps, and not repine,
But live content, which is the calmest life;
But pain is perfect misery, the worst
Of evils, and, excessive, overturns
All patience:"