"[371]
These examples (and others might be adduced) serve to show that Milton's
ear was too busy about the larger interests of his measures to be always
careful of the lesser. He was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant
in verse, capable, beyond any other English poet, of putting great masses
through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but
he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. In
reading "Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of vastness. You float under an
illimitable sky, brimmed with sunshine or hung with constellations; the
abysses of space are about you; you hear the cadenced surges of an unseen
ocean; thunders mutter round the horizon; and if the scene change, it is
with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. His
imagination seldom condenses, like Shakespeare's, in the kindling flash
of a single epithet, but loves better to diffuse itself. Witness his
descriptions, wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the
blue streams of air, controlling with his eye broad sweeps of champaign
or of sea, and rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser
expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps I should rather say the
indefinite, where more is meant than meets the ear, than any other of our
poets.
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