86/90 Through all the distractions of those eighteen years the grand subject had not ceased to haunt him, nor the longing to return to it and to his poetic vocation. Nay there had hung in his memory all this while certain lines he had actually written and destined for the opening of the intended tragedy. They were the ten lines that now form lines 32-41 of the fourth book of our present _Paradise Lost_. He had imagined, for the opening of his tragedy, Satan already arrived within our Universe out of Hell, and alighted on our central Earth near Eden, and gazing up to Heaven and the Sun blazing there in meridian splendour. |