He loved epithets (like _old_ and _far_) that suggest great
reaches, whether of space or time. This bias shows itself already in his
earlier poems, as where he hears
"The _far off_ curfew sound
Over some _widewatered_ shore,"
or where he fancies the shores[372] and sounding seas washing Lycidas far
away; but it reaches its climax in the "Paradise Lost." He produces his
effects by dilating our imaginations with an impalpable hint rather than
by concentrating them upon too precise particulars. Thus in a famous
comparison of his, the fleet has no definite port, but plies stemming
nightly toward the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He generalizes
always instead of specifying,--the true secret of the ideal treatment in
which he is without peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he is never
turgid. Tasso begins finely with
"Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne
II rauco suon della tartarea tromba;
Treman le spaziose atre caverne,
E l'aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba,"
but soon spoils all by condescending to definite comparisons with thunder
and intestinal convulsions of the earth; in other words, he is unwary
enough to give us a standard of measurement, and the moment you furnish
Imagination with a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statistical
poor-relation Commonplace.
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