BOOK FIRST
��From off the tossing of these fiery waves ; There rest, if any rest can harbour there ; And, re-assembling our afflicted powers, Consult how we may henceforth most of- fend
Our Enemy, our own loss how repair, How overcome this dire calamity, What reinforcement we may gain from
hope, 190
If not what resolution from despair."
Thus Satan, talking to his nearest Mate, With head uplift above the wave, and eyes That sparkling blazed ; his other parts be- sides Prone on the flood, extended long and
large,
Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the fables name of monstrous size, Titanian or Earth-born, that warred on
Jove,
Briareos or Typhon, whom the den By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast 200 Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream. Him, haply slumbering on the Norway
foam, The pilot of some small night-foundered
skiff,
Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, With fixed anchor in his scaly rind, Moors by his side under the lee, while night Invests the sea, and wished morn delays. So stretched out huge in length the Arch-
Fiend lay, Chained on the burning lake; nor ever
thence 210
Had risen, or heaved his head, but that the
will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought Evil to others, and enraged might see How all his malice served but to bring
forth
Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy, shewn On Man by him seduced, but on himself Treble confusion, wrath, and vengeance
poured. 220
Forthwith upright he rears from off the
pool His mighty stature; on each hand the
flames Driven backward slope their pointing spires,
and, rowled
��In billows, leave i' the midst a horrid vale. Then with expanded wings he steers his
flight
Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air, That felt unusual weight; till on dry land He lights if it were land that ever burned With solid, as the lake with liquid fire, And such appeared in hue as when the
force 230
Of subterranean wind transports a hill Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side Of thundering ^Etna, whose combustible And fuelled entrails, thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singed bottom all involved With stench and smoke. Such resting found
the sole Of unblest feet. Him followed his next
Mate; Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian
flood As gods, and by their own recovered
strength, 240
Not by the sufferance of supernal power. " Is this the region, this the soil, the
clime,"
Said then the lost Archangel, " this the seat That we must change for Heaven ? this
mournful gloom For that celestial light ? Be it so, since
He
Who now is sovran can dispose and bid What shall be right: fardest from Him is
best, Whom reason hath equalled, force hath
made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields, Where joy for ever dwells ! Hail, horrors !
hail, 25
Infernal World ! and thou, profoundest
Hell, Receive thy new possessor one who
brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of
Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater ? Here
at least We shall be free; the Almighty hath not
built Here for his envy, will not drive us
hence : a6
�� �
