But, though such passages abound, showing how, after years of blindness, the poet could still walk in imagination over the variegated earth and recall its delights of form and colour for his use, it will be found that even in these passages, and much more in others, there is here and there a subtle cunning peculiar to blindness. What I mean is that descriptive effects are attained with an unusual degree of frequency through the use of the metaphor of luminousness or radiance. When, for example, Ithuriel and Zephon, searching through Paradise at night, discover Satan squat like a toad at the ear of the sleeping Eve, and when Ithuriel touches him with his spear, how is the effect described (IV. 814-820)?

"As, when a spark

Lights on a heap of nitrous powder, laid
Fit for the tun some magazine to store
Against a rumoured war, the smutty grain,
With sudden blaze diffused inflames the air;
So started up in his own shape the Fiend."

In the sequel, Ithuriel and Zephon, leading Satan as their prisoner, bring him to the western end of the Garden, where the two subdivisions of guardian angels that have been going their rounds have just met and formed company under Gabriel's command. There Gabriel upbraids the captive Fiend, who in his turn defies Gabriel, and waxes insolent. One of his speeches is so insolent that the whole band of Gabriel's angels instinctively begin to close round him to attack him. And how is this described (IV. 977-979)?

"While thus he spake, the Angelic squadron bright
Turned fiery-red, sharpening in mooned horns
Their phalanx, and began to hem him round."

i.e. the appearance of the angelic band, advancing in the dark to encircle Satan, was like that of the crescent moon. Throughout the poem many similar instances will be found, in which the metaphor of luminousness is made to accomplish effects that we should hardly have expected from it. see the fond familiarity of the blind poet with the element of light in contrast with darkness, and an endless inventiveness of mode, degree, and circumstance in his fancies of this

We

element.

In Paradise Lost, brilliance is, to a considerable extent, Milton's favourite synonym for beauty.1

1 To prevent mistake, may state that I have already, in various places, and sometimes anonymously, expressed some of the speculations given in the text as to the influence of Milton's blindness on his later poetry.

PARADISE LOST:

A POEM IN TWELVE BOOKS,

THE AUTHOR

JOHN MILTON.