Silence was pleased. Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the Moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.
Darkness, silence, rest, the nightingale's song, the stars, the rising of the moon--these are all the material of this wonderful passage. Yet did ever such beauty fall with night upon such peace, save in Paradise alone?
Once he had got his story, based on his few authorities, with hints unconsciously taken and touches added, perhaps, from his reading of other poets--of Cædmon, Andreini, and Vondel, of Spenser, Sylvester, Crashaw, and the Fletchers--Milton's first task was to reduce it to the strict relations of time and space. His blindness probably helped him by relieving him from the hourly solicitations of the visible world, and giving him a dark and vacant space in which to rear his geometric fabric. Against this background the figures of his characters are outlined in shapes of light, and in this vacancy he mapped out his local Heaven and Hell.
Heaven, as Milton portrays it, is a plain of vast extent, diversified with hills, valleys, woods and streams. In the Second Book he speaks of it as--
Extended wide