There are only two,
indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. These are,
"Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,"
and
"With them from bliss to the bottomless deep."
This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out or had been
stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in
a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only
the first of these lines, and says that to make it regular by accenting
the word _bottomless_ on the second syllable would be "too horrible."
Certainly not, if Milton so accented it, any more than _blasphemous_ and
twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However that may be, Milton
could not have intended to close not only a period, but a paragraph also,
with an unmusical verse, and in the only other passage where the word
occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable:
"With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell."
As _bottom_ is a word which, like _bosom_ and _besom_, may be
monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, I am persuaded
that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to the same event)
gives us the word wanting in the two others, and that Milton wrote, or
meant to write,--
"Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit,"
which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that Milton liked
best.
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