And to realities yield all her shows.
And in the sequel, Adam bitterly laments that he had failed to profit by this advice. He might have been comforted by the wisdom of Chaucer's Franklin:--
When maistrie cometh, the god of love anon
Beteth his wynges and, farewel, he is gon!
The explanation of all this is clear to see. Milton was not, as he has sometimes been described, a callous and morose Puritan. He was extraordinarily susceptible to the attractions of feminine beauty and grace. Adam's confession is his own. But the ideal of character that he had put before himself caused him passionately to resent this susceptibility. It was the joint in his harness, the main breach in his Stoicism, the great anomaly in a life regulated as for his Task-master. He felt that beauty was a power not himself, unbalancing and disturbing the rational self-centred poise of his soul. There have been poets whose service of Venus Verticordia was whole-hearted. But to Milton the power of Beauty was a magnetism to be distrusted for its very strength. He felt something of what he makes Satan express, that there is terror in love and beauty "not approached by stronger hate." The Chorus in Samson Agonistes makes a similar observation:--
Yet beauty, though injurious, hath strange power
After offence returning, to regain
Love once possessed.
To escape from the dominion of the tyrant is the duty of a wise man. When Raphael remarked that "Love ... hath his seat in Reason, and is judicious," he committed himself to a statement which a longer experience of the world would have enabled him to correct. But Milton wished it true; and perhaps even lured himself into a belief of its truth. At any rate, when Satan, in Paradise Regained, expounds his opinion on the matter, it is found, for once, to be in substantial agreement with Raphael's:--
Beauty stands