Home to his mother's house private returned.
And Samson Agonistes brings as glorious a triumph to no less peaceful a close:--
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
The dying fall is the same in all three, and is the form of ending preferred by the musical and poetic genius of Milton.
Passages of a crowded and ostentatious magnificence are more frequent in Paradise Lost than in either of the two later poems. In Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes the enhanced severity of a style which rejects almost all ornament was due in part, no doubt, to a gradual change in Milton's temper and attitude. It is not so much that his power of imagination waned, as that his interest veered, turning more to thought and reflection, less to action and picture. In these two poems, at the last, he celebrated that
better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
which he had professed to sing in Paradise Lost. We are told by his nephew that he "could not bear with patience any such thing related to him" as that Paradise Regained was inferior to Paradise Lost. He was right; its merits and beauties are of a different and more sombre kind, yet of a kind perhaps further out of the reach of any other poet than even the constellated glories of Paradise Lost itself. It should be remembered that Paradise Lost, although it was written by Milton between the fiftieth and the fifty-seventh years of his age, was conceived by him, in its main outlines, not later than his thirty-fourth year. Two of the passages noticed above, where Satan addresses himself to the Sun and where the Angel leads Adam and Eve out of Paradise, embody situations which had appealed to his younger imagination. Some of the very words of Satan's address were written, we learn from Phillips, about 1642. And the expulsion of Adam and Eve seems to contain a reminiscence of the time when Milton was considering the history of Lot as a possible subject for an epic. The lines--
In either hand the hastening Angel caught
Our lingering parents--