Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 3.

Helon is the seventh bridegroom, and with this plighting of his troth to Egla the poem ends.

Although ‘Zophiel’ has remained almost wholly unknown to the reading public, it did not fail of recognition on its publication. Mr. Griswold calls Zophiel the finest fallen angel that has come to us from the hand of a poet. ‘Milton's outcasts from heaven,’ he says, ‘are utterly depraved and abraded of their glory, but Zophiel has traces of his original virtue and beauty, and a lingering hope of restoration to the presence of the Divinity.’

Mrs. Gustafson claims that neither in the ‘Loves of the Angels’ nor in ‘Lalla Rookh’ does Thomas Moore's flowing measure equal the musical cadences of ‘Zophiel,’ and that there is greater beauty of scene and bloom lavished on the single acacian bower where Zophiel wistfully watches over Egla's sleep than on the whole journey of the beautiful Lalla.

She also adds: ‘In the Choric Song of Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters the mosaic detail of sensuous description, though as delicate, is not as thoughtful nor so warm in feeling;’ and again, ‘Milton's presentment of Satan, though a grand is a somewhat coarse appeal to our physical perceptions—Zophiel a sombre presence of mystic power and beauty, infused with evil and impressive by the distinctively spiritual significance of the vision.’

Southey's enthusiastic appreciation is well known. Charles Lamb rose from the reading of ‘Zophiel’ with the exclamation: ‘Southey says it is by some Yankee woman; as if there had ever been a woman capable of anything so great!’ And still ‘Zophiel’ remains unread and even unknown by name to the general reader.

And yet, although the machinery is cumbersome, the lines often weak and the meaning obscure, the situations, even when dramatically conceived, lacking that