The strain heard in the "Nativity Ode," in the "Solemn
Music," and in "Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards metrical
construction, than anything that had thrilled the English ear before,
giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay
silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various
language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing
breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that Milton was great and
original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's fondness for dilatation as
respects thoughts and images. In Milton it extends to the language also,
and often to the single words of which a period is composed. He loved
phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like
Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages that stamp him great, the
verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather
with resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is true that he is
cunning in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell in his
orchestra without being obvious, but it is in the more scientific region
of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold
it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist and a
master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with misleading intervals
between and unobviously in his blank-verse:--
"There rest, if any rest can harbour _there_;
And, reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how re_pair_,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from des_pair_.
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