flood, extended long and large, Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the fables name of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warred on Jove, Briarios or Typhon, whom the den By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream. Him, haply, slumbering on the Norway foam, The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff, Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, With fixèd anchor in his skaly rind, Moors by his side under the lee, while night Invests the sea, and wished morn delays. So stretched out huge in length the Arch-Fiend lay, Chained on the burning lake; nor ever thence Had risen or heaved his head, but that the will And high permission of all-ruling Heaven Left him at large to his own dark designs, That with reiterated crimes he might Heap on himself damnation, while he sought Evil to others, and enraged might see How all his malice served but to bring forth Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn On Man by him seduced, but on himself Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance poured.
Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool His mighty stature; on each hand the flames Driven backward slope their pointing spires, and, rolled In billows, leave i’ the midst a horrid vale. Then with expanded wings he steers his flight Aloft, incumbent on the dusky air That felt unusual weight; till on dry land He lights—if it were land that ever burned With solid, as the lake with liquid fire, And such appeared in hue, as when the force Of subterranean wind transports a hill Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side Of thundering Aetna, whose combustible And fuelled entrails thence conceiving fire, Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds, And leave a singed bottom all involved With stench and smoke: such resting found the sole Of unblest feet. Him followed his next mate, Both glorying to have scaped the Stygian flood As gods, and by their own recovered strength, Not by the sufferance of supernal power.
“Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,” Said then the lost Archangel, “this the seat That we must change for Heaven? this mournful gloom