The resemblance lies in the sentiment and situation,
not in the bare event. The glorious youth of the consecrated
deliverer, his signal overthrow of the Philistine foe with means so
inadequate that the hand of God was manifest in the victory; his final
humiliation, which he owed to his own weakness and disobedience, and
the present revelry and feasting of the uncircumsised Philistines in
the temple of their idol,--all these things together constitute a
parable of which no reader of Milton's day could possibly mistake the
interpretation. More obscurely adumbrated is the day of vengeance,
when virtue should return to the repentant backslider, and the
idolatrous crew should be smitten with a swift destruction in the
midst of their insolent revelry. Add to these the two great personal
misfortunes of the poet's life, his first marriage with a Philistine
woman, out of sympathy with him or his cause, and his blindness; and
the basis of reality becomes so complete, that the nominal personages
of the drama almost disappear behind the history which we read through
them.
But while for the biographer of Milton _Samson Agonistes_ is charged
with a pathos, which as the expression of real suffering no fictive
tragedy can equal, it must be felt that as a composition the drama is
languid, nerveless, occasionally halting, never brilliant.
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