With speed what force is left, and all employ
In our defence, lest unawares we lose
This our high place, our sanctuary, our hill.
It is unnecessary to quote more of the speeches in Heaven; they are tangles of Scriptural phrase, from which there can be extracted neither good divinity nor good humanity. "The glory of God," says the Wisdom of Solomon, "is to conceal a thing; the glory of the King is to find it out." But the glory of Milton's Deity is to explain a thing. The proud voluble candour of some of these speeches reminds us only of the author of A Defence of the People of England. In some of them there is even a flavour of uneasy boastfulness, as of one who is anxious not to be lessened in the estimation of the rebel adversary.
It may be pleaded that the epical necessities of the poem imposed finite conceptions, of one sort or another, upon Milton; and that, when once he had begun to define and explain, he was carried further and further along that perilous way without being fully conscious of whither he was tending. Yet his persistent accumulation of harsh and dread traits seems wilful in its nature; he bases his description, no doubt, on hints from Scripture, but he pays no attention to any that do not fall in with his own narrow and gloomy conception. Satan is permitted to rise from the burning lake--
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation.
When he arrives at the foot of the stairway that joins Heaven and the World--
The stairs were then let down, whether to dare
The Fiend by easy ascent, or aggravate