...celebrated as himself who formed it. And what a picture of beauty has Milton given in his description Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns...sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access denied : and overhead upgrew Insuperable height of loftiest shade, Cedar, and pine, and fir,...

...his gestures fierce He mark'd and mad demeanor, then alone, As he suppos'd, all unobserv'd, unseen. to hurt, and certain to destroy ! The haughty nymph, in open beauty drest, sleep wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access denied ; and...

...his gestures fierce He marked and mad demeanour, then alone, As he supposed, all unobserved, unseen. So on he fares, and to the border comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champain head Of a steep wilderness whose hairy sides With...

..."History of Moscovia". I. The Approach to Paradise, compared to the Forests of Northern Russia. 4.131 So on he fares, and to the border comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound, the champain head 5 Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides...

...first approached by Satan, while making explicit the sexual suggestion many readers have found there": As with a rural mound the champaign head Of a steep...wilderness, whose hairy sides With thicket overgrown . . . Access denied. (Paradise Lost, 4:134-38) I would add that in making explicit Milton's repressed...

...glimpse of paradise is an astonishing synthesis of the broadly sensual and the specifically sexual: So on he fares, and to the border comes, Of Eden,...where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound the champaign head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides...

...profoundly agitated sexual condition, Satan arrives at the wall of Eden, which "is seen as a mons Veneris, 'a rural mound, the champaign head / Of a steep wilderness,...sides / With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, / Access denied' (4.13437). "10 Though Satan gains access into Eden, access to the mons Veneris will...

...Milton's: "Paradise . . . with her enclosure green / As with a rural mound the champaign [open country] head / of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides / With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, / Access denied." These lines develop from the ideas of an enclosed garden whose function is to maintain...

...from the savage world outside: Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, Crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound the champaign head Of...sides With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, Access deni'd. (4-132-7) The geocosm, then, mirrors the universe at large: as the Aristotelian cosmos...

...version of the scriptural land flowing with milk and honey. Paradise crowns the head of a steep mountain: So on he fares, and to the border comes Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, Now nearer, Crowns with her enclosure green, As with a rural mound the champaign head Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides...