The horizon of _Paradise Lost_ is not narrower than all space, its
chronology not shorter than eternity; the globe of our earth becomes
a mere spot in the physical universe, and that universe itself a drop
suspended in the infinite empyrean. His aspiration had thus reached
"one of the highest arcs that human contemplation circling upwards can
make from the glassy sea whereon she stands" (_Doctr. and Disc_.),
Like his contemporary Pascal, his mind had beaten her wings against
the prison walls of human thought.
The vastness of the scheme of _Paradise Lost_ may become more apparent
to us if we remark that, within its embrace, there to be equal place
for both the systems of physical astronomy which were current in the
seventeenth century. In England, about the time _Paradise Lost_ was
being written, the Copernican theory, which placed the sun in the
centre of our system, was already the established belief of the few
well-informed. The old Ptolemaic or Alphonsine system, which explained
the phenomena on the hypothesis of nine (or ten) transparent hollow
spheres wheeling round the stationary earth, was still the received
astronomy of ordinary people.
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