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Milton was not dependent upon a dubious tradition in the subject he
had selected. Man's fall and recovery were recorded in the Scriptures.
And the two media of truth, the internal and the external, as deriving
from the same source, must needs be in harmony. That the Spirit
enlightens the mind within, in this belief the Puritan saint, the
poet, and the prophet, who all met in Milton, were at one. That the
Old Testament Scriptures were also a revelation, from God, was an
article of faith which he had never questioned. Nor did he only
receive these books as conveying in substance a divine view of the
world's history, he regarded them as in the letter a transcript
of fact. If the poet-prophet would tell the story of creation or
redemption, he was thus restrained not only by the general outline and
imagery of the Bible, but by its very words. And here we must note the
skill of the poet in surmounting an added or artificial difficulty, in
the subject he had chosen as combined with his notion of inspiration.
He must not deviate in a single syllable from the words of the
Hebrew books. He must take up into his poem the whole of the sacred
narrative.
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