are still his. The sense of his punishment seems lost in the magnitude
of it; the fierceness of tormenting flames is qualified and made
innoxious by the greater fierceness of his pride; the loss of infinite
happiness to himself is compensated in thought, by the power of
inflicting infinite misery on others. Yet Satan is not the principle of
malignity, or of the abstract love of evil--but of the abstract love
of power, of pride, of self-will personified, to which last principle
all other good and evil, and even his own, are subordinate. From this
principle he never once flinches. His love of power and contempt for
suffering are never once relaxed from the highest pitch of intensity.
His thoughts burn like a hell within him; but the power of thought holds
dominion in his mind over every other consideration. The consciousness
of a determined purpose, of "that intellectual being, those thoughts
that wander through eternity," though accompanied with endless pain, he
prefers to nonentity, to "being swallowed up and lost in the wide womb
of uncreated night." He expresses the sum and substance of all ambition
in one line. "Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, doing or
suffering!" After such a conflict as his, and such a defeat, to retreat
in order, to rally, to make terms, to exist at all, is something; but he
does more than this--he founds a new empire in hell, and from it
conquers this new world, whither he bends his undaunted flight, forcing
his way through nether and surrounding fires. The poet has not in all
this given us a mere shadowy outline; the strength is equal to the
magnitude of the conception. The Achilles of Homer is not more distinct;
the Titans were not more vast; Prometheus chained to his rock was not a
more terrific example of suffering and of crime. Wherever the figure of
Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, "rising aloft incumbent
on the dusky air," it is illustrated with the most striking and
appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic,
irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed--but dazzling in its