Hurled headlong downward from th' ethereal height.
The word "flaming" in Milton's splendid line did not suit Pope's purpose--so it disappears, and with it half the glory of the original. In place of it, to eke out the syllables, he inserts the idle, if not foolish, substitute "downward." This is the art of sinking in poetry. Again, Ulysses, narrating his adventures, in the Ninth Odyssey, remarks:--
In vain Calypso long constrained my stay,
With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.
The whole line, so beautiful when it describes the modesty of Eve, in its new context becomes stark nonsense. It is Ulysses who is "reluctant," and Calypso who is "amorous." The misuse of Milton's line makes the situation comic.
James Thomson (to take another example) with a genuine thin vein of originality, too often conceals it under Miltonic lendings. The trail of Paradise Lost runs all through The Seasons. In such a description as this of the Moon in Autumn there is a cluster of reminiscences:--
Meanwhile the Moon
Full-orbed and breaking through the scattered clouds,
Shows her broad visage in the crimsoned east.
Turned to the Sun direct, her spotted disk,