The religion of every Christian if it
is real is a poem. He pictures a background of Holy Land scenery, and
he creates a Jesus who continually converses with him and reveals to him
much more than is found in the fragmentary details of the Gospels. When
Milton goes beyond his documents he does not imagine for the purpose of
filling up: the additions are expression.
Milton belonged to that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy.
Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was "powerfully affected" only
by that "which is conversant with or turns upon infinity," and man is to
him a being with such a relationship to infinity that Heaven and Hell
contend over him. Every touch which sets forth the eternal glory of
Heaven and the scarcely subordinate power of Hell magnifies him.
Johnson, whose judgment on Milton is unsatisfactory because he will not
deliver himself sufficiently to beauty which he must have recognised,
nevertheless says of the Paradise Lost, that "its end is to raise the
thoughts above sublunary cares," and this is true.
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