Observe at what a
reverent distance he begins when he is about to speak of himself, as at
the beginning of the Third Book and the Seventh. His sustained strength
is especially felt in his beginnings. He seems always to start full-sail;
the wind and tide always serve; there is never any fluttering of the
canvas In this he offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who has to
go through with a great deal of _yo-heave-ohing_ before he gets under
way. And though, in the didactic parts of "Paradise Lost," the wind dies
away sometimes, there is a long swell that will not let us forget it, and
ever and anon some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its tamer
peers heaped with stormy memories. And the poem never becomes incoherent;
we feel all through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, a great
controlling reason in whose safe-conduct we trust implicitly.
Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's English are, it seems to me, for the
most part unsatisfactory He occupies some ten pages, for example, with a
history of the genitival form _its_, which adds nothing to our previous
knowledge on the subject and which has no relation to Milton except for
its bearing on the authorship of some verses attributed to him against
the most overwhelming internal evidence to the contrary. Mr.
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