If, again, Wordsworth and Coleridge are right in pronouncing "Paradise Regained" the most perfect of Milton's works in point of execution, the proof is afforded that perfect execution is not the chief test of poetic excellence.

Whatever these great men may have propounded in theory, it cannot be believed that they would not have rather written the first two books of "Paradise Lost" than ten such poems as "Paradise Regained," and yet they affirm that Milton's power is even more advantageously exhibited in the latter work than in the other.
There can be no solution except that greatness in poetry depends mainly upon the subject, and that the subject of "Paradise Lost" is infinitely the finer.

Perhaps this should not be.

Perhaps to "the visual nerve purged with euphrasy and rue" the spectacle of the human soul successfully resisting supernatural temptation would be more impressive than the material sublimities of "Paradise Lost," but ordinary vision sees otherwise.

Satan "floating many a rood" on the sulphurous lake, or "up to the fiery concave towering high," or confronting Death at the gate of Hell, kindles the imagination with quite other fire than the sage circumspection and the meek fortitude of the Son of God.