draws deep upon his Italian resources. In the description of Eve, and
throughout this part of the poem, the poet is predominant over the
theologian. Dress is the symbol of the Fall, but the mark of intellect;
and the metaphysics of dress are, the hiding what is not symbolic and
displaying by discrimination what is. The love of Adam and Eve in
Paradise is of the highest merit--not phantomatic, and yet removed from
every thing degrading. It is the sentiment of one rational being towards
another made tender by a specific difference in that which is
essentially the same in both; it is a union of opposites, a giving and
receiving mutually of the permanent in either, a completion of each in
the other.

Milton is not a picturesque, but a musical, poet; although he has this
merit that the object chosen by him for any particular foreground always
remains prominent to the end, enriched, but not incumbered, by the
opulence of descriptive details furnished by an exhaustless imagination.
I wish the Paradise Lost were more carefully read and studied than I can
see any ground for believing it is, especially those parts which, from
the habit of always looking for a story in poetry, are scarcely read at
all,--as for example, Adam's vision of future events in the 11th and
12th books. No one can rise from the perusal of this immortal poem
without a deep sense of the grandeur and the purity of Milton's soul, or
without feeling how susceptible of domestic enjoyments he really was,
notwithstanding the discomforts which actually resulted from an
apparently unhappy choice in marriage. He was, as every truly great poet
has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own
aspirations, either in religion, or politics, or society, he gave up his
heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on
the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendant
ideal.