Both were right.

Milton did not profess to have been in heaven or hell.

He might therefore reasonably confine himself to magnificent generalities.

Far different was the office of the lonely traveller, who had wandered through the nations of the dead.

Had he described the abode of the rejected spirits in language resembling the splendid lines of the English Poet,--had he told us of-- "An universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds Perverse all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, unutterable, and worse Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived, Gorgons, and hydras, and chimaeras dire"-- this would doubtless have been noble writing.