men.” Immediately a place Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark; A lazar-house it seemed, wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased, all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums. Dire was the tossing, deep the groans; Despair Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch; And over them triumphant Death his dart Shook, but delayed to strike, though oft invoked With vows, as their chief good and final hope. Sight so deform what heart of rock could long Dry-eyed behold? Adam could not, but wept, Though not of woman born: compassion quelled His best of man, and gave him up to tears A space, till firmer thoughts restrained excess, And, scarce recovering words, his plaint renewed:
“O miserable Mankind, to what fall Degraded, to what wretched state reserved! Better end here unborn. Why is life given To be thus wrested from us? rather why Obtruded on us thus? who, if we knew What we receive, would either not accept Life offered, or soon beg to lay it down, Glad to be so dismissed in peace. Can thus The image of God in Man, created once So goodly and erect, though faulty since, To such unsightly sufferings be debased Under inhuman pains? Why should not Man, Retaining still divine similitude In part, from such deformities be free, And for his Maker’s image sake exempt?”
“Their Maker’s image,” answered Michael, “then Forsook them, when themselves they vilified To serve ungoverned Appetite, and took His image whom they served—a brutish vice, Inductive mainly to the sin of Eve. Therefore so abject is their punishment, Disfiguring not God’s likeness, but their own; Or, if his likeness, by themselves defaced While they pervert pure Nature’s healthful rules To loathsome sickness; worthily, since they God’s image did not reverence in themselves.”