They have repeated the miracles of Orpheus and Amphion, metamorphosing one most bitterly obnoxious, of whom so late as 1687 a royalist wrote that "his fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff, and his memory will always stink," into an object of universal veneration.

From the first instant of perusal the imagination is led in captivity, and for the first four books at least stroke upon stroke of sublimity follows with such continuous and undeviating regularity that sublimity seems this Creation's first law, and we feel like pigmies transported to a world of giants.

There is nothing forced or affected in this grandeur, no visible effort, no barbaric profusion, everything proceeds with a severe and majestic order, controlled by the strength that called it into being.

The similes and other poetical ornaments, though inexpressibly magnificent, seem no more so than the greatness of the general conception demands.

Grant that Satan in his fall is not "less than archangel ruined," and it is no exaggeration but the simplest truth to depict his mien-- "As when the sun, new risen, Looks through the horizontal misty air, Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations." When such a being voyages through space it is no hyperbole to compare him to a whole fleet, judiciously shown at such distance as to suppress every minute detail that could diminish the grandeur of the image-- "As when far off at sea a fleet descried Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants bring Their spicy drugs: they on the trading flood, Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape, Ply stemming nightly towards the pole: so seemed Far off the flying Fiend." These similes, and an infinity of others, are grander than anything in Homer, who would, however, have equalled them with an equal subject.
Dante's treatment is altogether different; the microscopic intensity of perception in which he so far surpasses Homer and Milton affords, in our opinion, no adequate compensation for his inferiority in magnificence.