He had imagined Satan, in this pause of his first advent into the Universe he was to ruin, thus addressing the Sun as its chief visible representative:-- "O thou that with surpassing glory crowned, Look'st from thy sole dominion like the god Of this new World,--at whose sight all the stars Hide their diminished heads,--to thee I call, But with no friendly voice, and add thy name, O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams, That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere, Till pride and worse ambition threw me down, Warring in Heaven against Heaven's matchless King!" And now, after eighteen years, the poem having been resumed, but with the resolution, made natural by Milton's literary observations and experiences in the interval, that the dramatic form should be abandoned and the epic substituted, these ten lines, written originally for the opening of the Drama, were to be the nucleus of the Epic.[1] With our present _Paradise Lost_ before us, we can see the very process of the gradual reinvention.

In the epic Satan must not appear, as had been proposed in the drama, at once on our earth or within our universe.

He must be fetched from the transcendental regions, the vast extra-mundane spaces, of his own prior existence and history.

And so, round our fair universe, newly-created and wheeling softly on its axle, conscious as yet of no evil, conscious only of the happy earth and sweet human life in the midst, and of the steady diurnal change from day and light-blue sunshine into spangled and deep-blue night, Milton was figuring and mapping out those other infinitudes which outlay and encircled his conception of all this mere Mundane Creation.

Deep down beneath this MUNDANE CREATION, and far separated from it, he was seeing the HELL from which was to come its woe; all round the Mundane Creation, and surging everywhere against its outmost firmament, was the dark and turbid CHAOS out of which its orderly and orbicular immensity had been cut; and high over all, radiant above Chaos, but with the Mundane Universe pendent from it at one gleaming point, was the great EMPYREAN or HEAVEN of HEAVENS, the abode of Angels and of Eternal Godhead.