can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and
furnish sentiment and action to superior beings; to trace the
counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven.

But he could not be always in other worlds; he must sometimes
revisit earth, and tell of things visible and known. When he cannot
raise wonder by the sublimity of his mind, he gives delight by its
fertility.

Whatever be his subject, he never fails to fill the imagination.
But his images and descriptions of the scenes or operations of
nature do not seem to be always copied from original form, nor to
have the freshness, raciness, and energy of immediate observation.
He saw nature, as Dryden expresses it, "through the spectacles of
books;" and on most occasions calls learning to his assistance. The
garden of Eden brings to his mind the vale of Enna, where Proserpine
was gathering flowers. Satan makes his way through fighting
elements, like Argo between the Cyanean rocks, or Ulysses between
the two Sicilian whirlpools, when he shunned Charybdis on the
larboard. The mythological allusions have been justly censured, as
not being always used with notice of their vanity; but they
contribute variety to the narration, and produce an alternate
exercise of the memory and the fancy.

His similes are less numerous, and more various, than those of his
predecessors. But he does not confine himself within the limits of
rigorous comparison: his great excellence is amplitude; and he
expands the adventitious image beyond the dimensions which the
occasion required. Thus, comparing the shield of Satan to the orb
of the moon, he crowds the imagination with the discovery of the