I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”
The First is taken, hint and form both, from Homer. Homer, girding up his strength to sing the war of confederated Greece against Troy and her confederates, makes over his own overpowering theme to a Spirit able to support the burden—to the Muse.
Sing, Goddess, he begins, the Anger of Achilles.
NORTH.
Even so Milton. After proposing in a few words the great argument of his Poem—that fatal first act of disobedience to the Creator, by which our First Parents, along with His favour, forfeited Innocence, Bliss, Immortality, and Paradise, for themselves and their posterity, until the coming of the Saviour shall redeem the Sin and loss—he devolves his own task upon a Muse, whom he deems far higher than the Muse of his greatest predecessor, and whom he, to mark this superiority, addresses as the Heavenly Muse.
TALBOYS.
She is the Muse who inspired on the summit now of Horeb, now of Sinai; when for forty years in retreat from his own people, yet under their Egyptian yoke, he kept the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro—the actual Shepherd who, from communing with God and commissioned by God, came down into Egypt again to be the Shepherd of his people and to lead out the flock of Israel.
SEWARD.
She is the Muse who, when the Hebrew tribes were at length seated in the promised land—when Zion in the stead of Sinai was the chosen Mountain of God—inspired Psalmists and Prophets.