The other great epic
poems worthy to be compared with Milton's, the Iliad, Odyssey, AEneid,
and Divine Comedy, all agree in representing man as an object of the
deepest solicitude to the gods or God. Milton's conception of God is
higher than Homer's, Virgil's, or Dante's, but the care of the Miltonic
God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by
Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more
impressive in Milton than in the others.
There is nothing which the most gifted of men can create that is not
mixed up with earth, and Milton, too, works it up with his gold. The
weakness of the Paradise Lost is not, as Johnson affirms, its lack of
human interest, for the Prometheus Bound has just as little, nor is
Johnson's objection worth anything that the angels are sometimes
corporeal and at other times independent of material laws. Spirits
could not be represented to a human mind unless they were in a measure
subject to the conditions of time and space. The principal defect in
Paradise Lost is the justification which the Almighty gives of the
creation of man with a liability to fall.
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