For a few risings and settings of yon since-bedimmed Sun—Love and celestial Bliss dwelling amidst the shades and flowers of Eden yet sinless—then, from a MORE FATAL APPLE, Discord clashing into and subverting the harmonies of Creation.
"Sin, and her shadow, Death; and Misery,
Death's Harbinger."
The Iliad, indeed!
SEWARD.
I wish you could be persuaded, sir, to give us an Edition of Milton.
NORTH.
No. I must not take it out of the Doctor's hands. Then, as to Milton's style. If the Christian Theologian must be held bold who has dared to mix the Delivered Writings with his own Inventions—bold, too, was he, the heir of the mind that was nursed in the Aristotelian Schools, to unite, as he did, on the other hand, the gait of an understanding accomplished in logic, with the spontaneous and unstudied step of Poetry. The style of Milton, gentlemen, has been praised for simplicity; and it is true that the style of the Paradise Lost has often an austere simplicity; but one sort of it you miss—the proper Epic simplicity—that Homeric simplicity of the Telling.
SEWARD.
Perhaps, sir, in such a Poem such simplicity could not be.
NORTH.