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MUCH HE THE PLACE ADMIRED.....CONCEIVES DELIGHT (LINES 444-449)
Satan is happy to find Eve alone. His search for the couple has acquainted him with the beauty of Paradise. The change from the stifling environs of Hell to the exquisite landscape of Paradise casts a spell on Satan, so that he even forgets for some time the evil purpose for which he had come there. The effect is described by Milton through a pastoral evocation. He compares Satan’s state of mind to that of a man who has felt stifled in a populous city for a long time, where the air is polluted because of houses built close to each other, and the stink of the open drains, and who suddenly on a summer morning breathes the pure and exhilarating air of a village and its farms. Everything that he sees there strikes him as beautiful and raises visions of sweet refreshment quite beyond itself Satan admired Paradise greatly, but when he caught sight of Eve, who was working alone, his admiration of her person was much more than what it had been for the place. It seemed to him that she summed up all the delights of Paradise in her person.