And when a lesser spirit falls, what a sad AEolian melody describes the
downward flight:
... How he fell
From Heaven they fabled thrown by angry Jove,
Sheer o'er the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve
A summer's day; and with the setting sun,
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star.
The heavenly colloquies to which we have alluded between the Father and
the Son, involve questions of theology, and present peculiar views--such
as the subordination of the Son, and the relative unimportance of the
third Person of the Blessed Trinity. They establish Milton's Arianism
almost as completely as his Treatise on Christian Doctrine.
HIS FAULTS.--Grand, far above all human efforts, his poems fail in these
representations. God is a spirit; he is here presented as a body, and that
by an uninspired pen. The poet has not been able to carry us up to those
infinite heights, and so his attempt only ends in a humanitarian
philosophy: he has been obliged to lower the whole heavenly hierarchy to
bring it within the scope of our objective comprehension.
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