It is a sort of delphic Abstraction – a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected and put in a Mist. The next mention of Vale is one of the most pathetic in the whole range of Poetry.

Others, more mild,

Retreated in a silent Valley etc.

[II, 546–7]

How much of the charm is in the Valley! –

6BOOK I, 527–67

but he, his wonted pride

Soon recollecting, with high words, that bore

Semblance of worth not substance, gently raised

Their fainting courage, and dispell’d their fears.

Then straight commands that at the warlike sound

Of trumpets loud and clarions be uprear’d

His mighty standard: that proud honour claim’d

Azazel as his right, a Cherub tall;

Who forthwith from the glittering staff unfurl’d

The imperial ensign, which full high advanced

Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind,

With gems and golden lustre rich emblazed,

Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while

Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds:

At which the universal host up-sent

A shout, that tore Hell’s concave, and beyond

Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.

All in a moment through the gloom were seen

Ten thousand banners rise into the air

With orient colours waving: with them rose

A forest huge of spears, and thronging helms

Appear’d, and serried shields in thick array

Of depth immeasurable: anon they move

In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood

Of flutes and soft recorders; such as raised

To height of noblest temper heroes old

Arming to battle, and instead of rage

Deliberate valour breath’d, firm and unmoved

With dread of death to flight or foul retreat;

Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage

With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase

Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain,

From mortal or immortal minds. Thus they

Breathing united force with fixed thought

Moved on in silence to soft pipes, that charm’d

Their painful steps o’er the burnt soil; and now

Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front

Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise

Of warriors old with order’d spear and shield,

Awaiting what command their mighty chief

Had to impose.

The light and shade – the sort of black brightness – the ebon diamonding – the ethiop Immortality – the sorrow, the pain, the sad-sweet Melody – the P[h]alanges of Spirits so depressed as to be ‘uplifted beyond hope’ – the short mitigation of Misery – the thousand Melancholies and Magnificences of this Page – leaves no room for anything to be said thereon but ‘so it is’.

7BOOK I, 591–9

his form had not yet lost

All her original brightness, nor appear’d

Less than Arch-Angel ruin’d, and the excess

Of glory obscured; 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, and with fear of change

Perplexes monarchs.

How noble and collected an indignation against Kings, ‘and for fear of change perplexes Monarchs’ etc. His very wishing should have had power to pull that feeble animal Charles from his bloody throne. ‘The evil days’ had come to him; he hit the new System of things a mighty mental blow; the exertion must have had or is yet to have some sequences.

8BOOK I, 710–30

Anon out of the earth a fabric huge

Rose like an exhalation, with the sound

Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,

Built like a temple, where pilasters round

Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid

With golden architrave; nor did there want

Cornice or frieze, with bossy sculptures graven;

The roof was fretted gold. Not Babylon,

Nor great Alcairo such magnificence

Equall’d in all their glories, to inshrine

Belus or Serapis their Gods, or seat

Their kings, when Egypt with Assyria strove

In wealth and luxury. The ascending pile

Stood fix’d her stately height; and straight the doors

Opening their brazen folds, discover, wide

Within, her ample spaces, o’er the smooth

And level pavement: from the arched roof

Pendent by subtle magic many a row

Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed

With Naphtha and Asphaltus, yielded light

As from a sky.

What creates the intense pleasure of not knowing? A sense of independence, of power, from the fancy’s creating a world of its own by the sense of probabilities. We have read the Arabian Nights and hear there are thousands of those sort of Romances lost – we imagine after them – but not their realities if we had them nor our fancies in their strength can go further than this Pandemonium –

‘Straight the doors opening’ etc.

‘rose like an exhalation’ –

9BOOK II, 546–61

Others, more mild,

Retreated in a silent valley, sing

With notes angelical to many a harp

Their own heroic deeds and hapless fall

By doom of battle; and complain that Fate

Free Virtue should inthrall to force or chance.

Their song was partial, but the harmony

(What could it less when Spirits immortal sing?)

Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment

The thronging audience. In discourse more sweet

(For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense)

Others apart sat on a hill retired,

In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high

Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,

Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

Milton is godlike in the sublime pathetic. In Demons, fallen Angels, and Monsters the delicacies of passion, living in and from their immortality, is of the most softening and dissolving nature. It is carried to the utmost here – ‘Others more mild’ – nothing can express the sensation one feels at ‘Their song was partial’ etc. Examples of this nature are divine to the utmost in other poets – in Caliban ‘Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments’ etc. In Theocritus, Polyphemus – and Homer’s Hymn to Pan where Mercury is represented as taking his ‘homely fac’d’ to heaven. There are numerous other instances in Milton – where Satan’s progeny is called his ‘daughter dear’ and where this same Sin, a female, and with a feminine instinct for the showy and martial is in pain lest death should sully his bright arms, ‘nor vainly hope to be invulnerable in those bright arms.’ Another instance is ‘pensive I sat alone.’ We need not mention ‘Tears such as Angels weep.’

10BOOK III, I, 51–9

Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born!

* * *

So much the rather thou, celestial Light,

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence

Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight.

Now had the Almighty Father from above,

From the pure empyrean where he sits

High throned above all height, bent down his eye,

His own works and their works at once to view.

The management of this Poem is Apollonian. Satan first ‘throws round his baleful eyes,’ the[n] awakes his legions, he consults, he sets forward on his voyage – and just as he is getting to the end of it we see the Great God and our first parent, and that same satan all brought in one’s vision – we have the invocation to light before we mount to heaven – we breathe more freely – we feel the great Author’s consolations coming thick upon him at a time when he complains most – we are getting ripe for diversity – the immediate topic of the Poem opens with a grand Perspective of all concerned.

11BOOK III, 135–7

Thus while God spake, ambrosial fragrance fill’d

All Heaven, and in the blessed Spirits elect

Sense of new joy ineffable diffused.

Hell is finer than this.

12BOOK III, 487–9

A violent cross wind from either coast

Blows them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry

Into the devious air.

This part in its sound is unaccountably expressive of the description.

13BOOK III, 606–17

What wonder then if fields and regions here

Breathe forth Elixir pure, and rivers run

Potable gold, when with one virtuous touch

The arch-chemic Sun, so far from us remote,

Produces with terrestrial humour mix’d,

Here in the dark so many precious things

Of colour glorious and effect so rare?

Here matter new to gaze the Devil met

Undazzled, far and wide his eye commands,

For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade,

But all sunshine, as when his beams at noon

Culminate from the Equator,…

A Spirit’s eye.

14BOOK IV, 1–5

O for that warning voice, which he who saw

The Apocalypse heard cry in Heaven aloud,

Then when the Dragon, put to second rout,

Came furious down to be revenged on men,

‘Woe to the inhabitants on earth!’

A friend of mine [probably Benjamin Bailey] says this Book has the finest opening of any – the point of time is gigantically critical – the wax is melted, the seal is about to be applied – and Milton breaks out, ‘O for that warning voice,’ etc. There is moreover an op[p]ortunity for a Grandeur of Tenderness – the opportunity is not lost. Nothing can be higher – Nothing so more than delphic.

15BOOK IV, 268–72

Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers,

Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis

Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world;

There are two specimens of a very extraordinary beauty in the Paradise Lost; they are of a nature as far as I have read, unexampled elsewhere – they are entirely distinct from the brief pathos of Dante – and they are not to be found even in Shakespeare – these are according to the great prerogative of poetry better described in themselves than by a volume. The one is in the fol[lowing] – ‘which cost Ceres all that pain’ – the other is that ending ‘Nor could the Muse defend her son’* – they appear exclusively Miltonic without the shadow of another mind ancient or modern.

16BOOK VI, 58–9

reluctant flames, the sign

Of wrath awaked;…

‘Reluctant’ with its original and modern meaning combined and woven together, with all its shades of signification has a powerful effect.

17BOOK VII, 420–23

but feather’d soon and fledge

They summ’d their pens, and, soaring the air sublime

With clang despised the ground, under a cloud

In prospect.

Milton in every instance pursues his imagination to the utmost – he is ‘sagacious of his Quarry,’ he sees Beauty on the wing, pounces upon it and gorges it to the producing his essential verse. ‘So from the root the springs lighter the green stalk,’ etc. † But in no instance is this sort of perseverance more exemplified than in what may be called his stationing or statu[a]ry. He is not content with simple description, he must station, – thus here, we not only see how the Birds ‘with clang despised the ground,’ but we see them ‘under a cloud in prospect.’ So we see Adam ‘Fair indeed and tall – under a plantare’ – and so we see Satan ‘disfigured – on the Assyrian Mount.’ This last with all its accompaniments, and keeping in mind the Theory of Spirits’ eyes and the simile of Gallilio [sic], has a dramatic vastness and solemnity fit and worthy to hold one amazed in the midst of this Paradise Lost –

18BOOK IX, 41–7

Me, of these

Nor skill’d nor studious, higher argument

Remains, sufficient of itself to raise

That name, unless an age too late, or cold

Climate, or years, damp my intended wing

Depress’d; and much they may, if all be mine,

Not hers who brings it nightly to my ear.

Had not Shakespeare liv’d?

19BOOK IX, 179–91

So saying, through each thicket, dank or dry,

Like a black mist low creeping, he held on

His midnight search, where soonest he might find

The serpent: him fast sleeping soon he found

In labyrinth of many a round self-roll’d,

His head the midst, well stored with subtle wiles.

Not yet in horrid shade or dismal den,

Nor nocent yet; but, on the grassy herb

Fearless, unfear’d, he slept: in at his mouth

The Devil enter’d, and his brutal sense,

In heart or head, possessing, soon inspired

With act intelligential; but his sleep

Disturb’d not, waiting close the approach of morn.

Satan having entered the Serpent, and inform’d his brutal sense – might seem sufficient – but Milton goes on ‘but his sleep disturb’d not.’ Whose spirit does not ache at the smothering and confinement – the unwilling stillness – the ‘waiting close’? Whose head is not dizzy at the prosaible* speculations of satan in the serpent prison – no passage of poetry ever can give a greater pain of suffocation.

APPENDIX 5

Keats on Kean’s Shakespearean Acting

Keats was asked by his friend, John Reynolds, the dramatic critic of the Champion, to review Edmund Kean’s return to the stage. Kean had been ill at the end of November 1817, and did not resume his role as Richard III until Monday, 15 December. Keats’s review appeared in the Champion, 21 December 1817 (reprinted Forman [1938–9] V, pp. 227–32). A second Shakespearean piece, published in the Champion, 28 December 1817, is commonly attributed to Keats, but Leonidas M. Jones (KSJ, III [1954], pp. 55–65) has argued persuasively for Reynolds’s authorship. It is reprinted by Forman (1938–9) V, pp. 233–46. Two further reviews by Keats for the Champion, one on Harlequin’s Vision, a pantomime, and the other on the tragedy, Retribution, appeared on 4 January 1818 (reprinted Forman [1938–9] V, pp.