Note 639 — THE ARGUMENT.
Reading edition
So Dryden says of Absalom,
And Paradise was opened in his face.
The original of the image in the text is in Isaiah li. 3:
He will make her wilderness like Eden, And her desert like the garden of Jehovah.
Whence Milton derived it, Par. Reg. i. 7:
And Eden raised in the waste wilderness.—Wakefield.