Listens delighted.”
Where the audible harmony of the spheres and the song of Urania seem to be as nearly as possible one and the same thing—namely, Music—which is The Beautiful in one of its kinds, used, with extremely profound and bold imagination, for expressing The Beautiful in all its kinds.
Who is it that, in presence of the Everlasting Throne, converses with her sister, Eternal Wisdom; plays with her—singing, the while, so that the awful Ear of Omnipotence bends from the Throne, listening and pleased?
The majestical Invocation opens the Seventh Book of the Paradise Lost; and the Seventh Book of the Paradise Lost is occupied from beginning to end in amplifying, with wonderful plenitude, exactness, beauty, and magnificence of description, the First Chapter in the Book of Genesis. In other words the Seventh Book of Paradise Lost describes the Week of Creation—the six days of God’s working, and the seventh of His rest.
Milton moulds, at the height of poetical power, into poetical form thoughts that are universal to the Spirit of Man. What then, we must ask, are the two Thoughts that rise in the Spirit of Man, looking with its awakened and instructed faculties upon the Universe of God? Assuredly one is, wonder at the adaptation of Means to Ends—that fitness of which all human Science is nothing but the progressive, inexhaustible revelation. This is that Eternal Wisdom, whom the Poet daringly finds a distinct inhabitant of the Empyrean. The other thought, insuppressibly arising upon the same contemplation, is, wonder of the overwhelming beauty that overflows the visible creation. This is the Heavenly Muse, Urania. The purpose of the Divine Mind to create the Useful Order of Things is impersonated as Eternal Wisdom. The purpose of the Divine Mind to create the Beauty of Things is impersonated under a name which the Poet boldly and reverently supplies. Milton’s description of the six days completely displays the two notions: it impresses the notion of Useful Order and Beauty.
SEWARD.
These verses, which introduce the Creation of Man on the sixth day, impress the two distinctly—
“Now Heaven in all her glory shone;”
—that is, for the Beautiful:
——“and roll’d