"Whom thus afflicted when sad Eve beheld,
Desolate where she sat, approaching nigh,
Soft words to his fierce passion she essayed;
But her with stern regard he thus repelled.
Out of my sight, thou serpent! That name best
Befits thee with him leagued, thyself as false
And hateful; nothing wants, but that thy shape,
Like his, and color serpentine, may show
Thy inward fraud, to warn all creatures from thee
Henceforth; lest that too heavenly form, pretended
To hellish falsehood, snare them! But for thee
I had persisted happy; had not thy pride
And wandering vanity, when least was safe,
Rejected my forewarning, and disdained
Not to be trusted, longing to be seen,
Though by the devil himself; him overweening
To overreach; but with the serpent meeting,
Fooled and beguiled; by him thou; I by thee
To trust thee from my side, imagined wise,
Constant, mature, proof against all assaults;
And understood not all was but a show,
Rather than solid virtue; all but a rib
Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears,
More to the part sinister, from me drawn;
Well if thrown out, as supernumerary
To my just number found. Oh! why did God,
Creator wise, that peopled highest heaven
With spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of nature, and not fill the world at once
With men, as angels, without feminine;
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind? This mischief had not then befallen,
And more that shall befall; innumerable
Disturbances on earth through female snares,
And strait conjunction with this sex.'"
Paradise Lost, x. 863-897.
The scriptural simplicity of this passage, as found in the poem of St. Avitus, will be by many esteemed better than Milton's ornamentation.
The book ends with a prediction of the advent of Christ, who is to triumph over Satan. The leaving of paradise is touchingly described at the close of the poem.
"The sentence given, and by the trembling pair
Received, with skins of beasts the Lord himself
Clothed both the man and woman.
Then he drove
Them out for ever from the happy garden
Of paradise. Prone to the ground they fell,
Those hapless ones. They entered on the world
That was to them a wilderness. They fled
With hasty steps, as by the avenging sword
Pursued. The earth before them had its bowers
Of trees and verdant turf; green meads and fountains,
And winding streams, appear to greet their sight;
Yet ah! how hideous is the landscape drear
After thy lovely face, O Paradise!
Startled, the pair survey the doleful scene,
And weep to think of all that they have lost;
They do not see the limits of the world;
And yet it seems a narrow cell; they groan
Immured in such a prison! Even the day
Is darkness to their eyes; while the clear sun
Is shining in his strength, they bitterly
Complain that all the light has vanished from them."
A Dutch poet also—Joost Van Den Vondel—wrote a drama on the fall of man, before Andreini's. Among the personages are Lucifer and his attendant evil spirits, Gabriel, the King of Angels, Michael, Uriel, etc. Adam and Eve are attended in paradise by a chief guardian angel. The lyrics of the heavenly host have considerable poetic beauty.
THE WILLIAN GIRLS
Some persons have a natural enjoyment of tribulation. They take a real pleasure in raising their eyebrows lugubriously, holding their heads a little on one side with a sorrowful and resigned expression, and looking at the world through blue spectacles. They "always sigh in thanking God," and can find a cloud in the sunniest sky. You can never conquer such people on their own ground. If you have a slight pain in your little finger, they have an excruciating pain in their thumb; if you have caught your robe on a nail, theirs has been rent on a spike; if you have been wet in a shower, they have been soaked in a torrent. These persons have minor voices, make great use of chromatics in speaking, and their affections seem to be situated in the liver.
Mr. Christopher Willian had a taint of this "green and yellow melancholy" in his disposition, and his rapidly increasing family gave full scope for its development.