Whatever he touches
swells and towers. That wonderful passage in Comus of the airy tongues,
perhaps the most imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured
out of a dry sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples
help us to understand the poet. When I find that Sir Thomas Browne had
said before Milton, that Adam "was _the wisest of all men since_," I am
glad to find this link between the most profound and the most stately
imagination of that age. Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of the
historical development of our poetry, of its apostolical succession, so
to speak. Every one has noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous proper
names, which have not only an acquired imaginative value by association,
and so serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have likewise a
merely musical significance. This he probably caught from Marlowe, traces
of whom are frequent in him. There is certainly something of what
afterwards came to be called Miltonic in more than one passage of
"Tamburlaine," a play in which gigantic force seems struggling from the
block, as in Michel Angelo's Dawn.
Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification of Milton are, in the main,
judicious, but when he ventures on particulars, one cannot always agree
with him. He seems to understand that our prosody is accentual merely,
and yet, when he comes to what he calls _variations_, he talks of the
"substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or the Spondee, for the
regular Iambus, or of the Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc.
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