Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 404, June, 1849

Dim foreshadowings, which Milton, I doubt not, discerned and cherished. The Iliad was the natural and spiritual father of the Paradise Lost —

SEWARD

And the son is greater than the sire.

NORTH

I see in the Iliad the love of Homer to Greece and to humankind. He was a legislator to Greece before Solon and Lycurgus – greater than either – after the manner fabled of Orpheus.

SEWARD

Sprung from the bosom of heroic life, the Iliad asked heroic listeners.

NORTH

See with what large-hearted love he draws the Men – Hector, and Priam, and Sarpedon – as well as the Woman Andromache – enemies! Can he so paint humanity and not humanise? He humanises us– who have literature and refined Greece and Rome – who have Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton – who are Christendom.

SEWARD

He loves the inferior creatures, and the face of nature.

NORTH

The Iliad has been called a Song of War. I see in it – a Song of Peace. Think of all the fiery Iliad ending in – Reconciled Submission!

SEWARD

"Murder Impossibility," and believe that there might have been an Iliad or a Paradise Lost in Prose.

NORTH

It could never have been, by human power, our Paradise Lost. What would have become of the Seventh Book? This is now occupied with describing the Six Days of Creation. A few verses of the First Chapter of Genesis extended into so many hundred lines. The Book, as it stands, has full poetical reason. First, it has a sufficient motive. It founds the existence of Adam and Eve, which is otherwise not duly led to. The revolted Angels, you know, have fallen, and the Almighty will create a new race of worshippers to supply their place – Mankind.

SEWARD

For this race that is to be created, a Home is previously to be built – or this World is to be created.

NORTH

I initiated you into Milton nearly thirty years ago, my dear Seward; and I rejoice to find that you still have him by heart. Between the Fall of the Angels, and that inhabiting of Paradise by our first parents, which is largely related by Raphael, there would be in the history which the poem undertakes, an unfilled gap and blank without this book. The chain of events which is unrolled would be broken – interrupted – incomplete.

SEWARD

And, sir, when Raphael has told the Rebellion and Fall of the Angels, Adam, with a natural movement of curiosity, asks of this "Divine Interpreter" how this frame of things began?

NORTH

And Raphael answers by declaring at large the Purpose and the Manner. The Mission of Raphael is to strengthen, if it be practicable, the Human Pair in their obedience. To this end, how apt his discourse, showing how dear they are to the Universal Maker, how eminent in his Universe!

SEWARD

The causes, then, of the Archangelic Narrative abound. And the personal interest with which the Two Auditors must hear such a revelation of wonders from such a Speaker, and that so intimately concerns themselves, falls nothing short of what Poetry justly requires in relations put into the mouth of the poetical Persons.

NORTH

And can the interest – not now of Raphael's, but of Milton's "fit audience" – be sustained throughout? The answer is triumphant. The Book is, from beginning to end, a stream of the most beautiful descriptive Poetry that exists. Not however, mind you, Seward, of stationary description.

SEWARD

Sir?

NORTH

A proceeding work is described; and the Book is replete and alive with motion – with progress – with action – yes, of action – of an order unusual indeed to the Epos, but unexcelled in dignity – the Creative Action of Deity!

SEWARD

What should hinder, then, but that this same Seventh Book should have been written in Prose?

NORTH

Why this only – that without Verse it could not have been read! The Verse makes present. You listen with Adam and Eve, and you hear the Archangel. In Prose this illusion could not have been carried through such a subject-matter. The conditio sine quâ non of the Book was the ineffable charm of the Description. But what would a series of botanical and zoological descriptions, for instance, have been, in Prose? The vivida vis that is in Verse is the quickening spirit of the whole.

BULLER

But who doubts it?

NORTH

Lord Bacon said that Poetry – that is, Feigned History – might be worded in Prose. And it may be; but how inadequately is known to Us Three.

BULLER

And to all the world.

NORTH

No – nor, to the million who do know it, so well as to Us, nor the reason why. But hear me a moment longer. Wordsworth, in his famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, asserts that the language of Prose and the language of Verse differ but in this – that in verse there is metre – and metre he calls an adjunct. With all reverence, I say that metre is not an adjunct – but vitality and essence; and that verse, in virtue thereof, so transfigures language, that it ceases to be the language of prose as spoken, out of verse, by any of the children of men.

SEWARD

Remove the metre, and the language will not be the language of prose?

NORTH

Not – if you remove the metre only – and leave otherwise the order of the words – the collocation unchanged – and unchanged any one of the two hundred figures of speech, one and all of which are differently presented in the language of Verse from what they are in Prose.

SEWARD