Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/138

 PARADISE LOST

��Genesis. The figures of Adam and Eve, Lucifer and Michael, had exerted over the poets a fascination which was in part picto- rial, in part due to the religious question- ing of the age. With most of these works Milton was doubtless familiar, and he was acting according to true epic tradition when he gathered into a work of commanding scope and unity the detached attempts of his predecessors. In this restricted but still significant sense, Paradise Lost is a " natural epic," with a law of growth like that of Beowulf, or the Iliad.

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Paradise Lost is eminently a cosmologi- cal poem, and demands on the part of the reader a clear visualization of the scheme of the universe which it presupposes. This scheme is so remote from our present con- ception that a few words of explanation or reminder may be called for.

In spite of the announcement by Coper- nicus, a century before Milton began to consider his subject, of the true physical order, and in spite of the work of Kepler and Galileo, establishing the theory on a secure basis, the new astronomy had made, by the middle of the seventeenth century, little progress toward supplanting the old Ptolemaic system which had held its place since the first century of the Christian era. This old system, discarded by a few ad- vanced scientific minds, still furnished the cosmologic outline for the world's thought, and was endeared to men's minds by a thousand associations of poetry and reli- gion. Whether for such reasons or be- eause of his own skepticism concerning the new theory, Milton cast his poem into the traditional mould, making, however, some important reservations and changes.

The fundamental difference between the Ptolemaic and the Copernican system is that in the old one the earth, not the sun, was made the centre about which all other bodies revolve. These other bodies, more-

��over, instead of moving freely through space, held in leash only by the force of gravitation (or, as was at first believed, by magnetic attraction), were conceived of as firmly fastened in concentric spheres or shells of some indeterminate transparent material, which shells moved upon one an- other in such a way as to bring about the bewildering irregularities noticeable in the movements of the bodies they carried. The order of these spheres was, beginning with the one nearest the earth, immediately sur- rounding the terrestrial air-belt : first, the sphere of the Moon; second, the sphere of Mercury ; third, the sphere of Venus ; fourth, the sphere of the Sun ; fifth, the sphere of Mars ; sixth, the sphere of Jupi- ter ; seventh, the sphere of Saturn ; eighth, the sphere of the Fixed Stars. This eighth sphere was known as the Firmament, be- cause of its supposed function of steadying the more volatile spheres within. Accord- ing to the original Ptolemaic scheme, this eighth sphere formed the outside limit of the created universe, the Mundus or Macrocosm; but later speculation added a ninth, called the Crystalline, to account for the precession of the equinoxes, and a tenth, called the Primum Mobile, or " First- moved." This last sphere, unlike the others, was conceived of as solid and non-trans- parent. It carried along by its momentum the spheres within, in their various revolu- tions; and it served, conveniently for the finite imagination, as a sort of necessary containing envelope for the whole.

Thus far, Milton's conception is identi- cal with that of the mediaeval cosmologists. In his account of the creation (Book VII., 192-550) he does not, it is true, take ac- count of the Ptolemaic spheres, perhaps because of the wavering state of his be- lief in them, but more probably because of his desire to keep close to the Biblical account. But elsewhere (Book III., 481- 483) he makes clear his adoption of the traditional belief concerning them. As to what lay outside the Primum Mobile,

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