On the freezing evening of 2 February 1802, Dorothy Wordsworth reached for her copy of Paradise Lost. She and her brother William had just finished a meal at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. “After tea I read aloud the eleventh book of Paradise Lost,” Dorothy wrote in her journal. “We were much impressed, and also melted into tears.” Although her diary entry is eloquent testimony to the afterlife of Milton's epic and its power to move readers and auditors, this is not an often-cited anecdote. Why not? I suspect it is because of two words: “eleventh book.”

Even some of the great admirers of Paradise Lost have had doubts about how Milton ended his poem. Samuel Johnson's bland observation that “none ever wished it longer than it is” can be taken as an implicit putdown of the art of the last two books. C. S. Lewis was more colorful and unambiguous. He branded the visions and narratives of things to come—the abridged history of humanity from Abel and Cain to the Last Judgment—“an untransmuted lump of futurity.” But if the Wordsworths’ response to Book XI was a minority view, they were nevertheless not alone. Most of that book takes place at the top of a mountain where Adam is offered a panoramic prospect view of the future. The prospect, as we will see in the fourth chapter, was a crucial strategy in Gibbon's pioneering way of writing history, and one of Wordsworth's most dramatic visions was the view from the top of Mount Snowdon in the final book of The Prelude. Christopher Phillips has emphasized that, for aspiring American epic poets during the early Republic and nineteenth century, the “mount of vision”—a prospect view of the future of the “new world”—was a recurrent motif and an undeniable homage to Books XI and XII of Paradise Lost.

There is no doubt that the final books of Paradise Lost settle into a lower key and that the poetry is more subdued than in the other 10. By the time readers finish the tenth book, they may feel that all the good stuff is over: