Milton, like other great
poets, wrote some bad verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so
than to conjure up some unimaginable reason why the reader should accept
them as the better for their badness. Such a bad verse is
"Rocks, caves, lakes, _fens_, bogs, _dens_ and shapes of death,"
which might be cited to illustrate Pope's
"And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."
Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any partiality for low words. He
rather loved them tall, as the Prussian King loved men to be six feet
high in their stockings, and fit to go into the grenadiers. He loved them
as much for their music as for their meaning,--perhaps more. His style,
therefore, when it has to deal with commoner things, is apt to grow a
little cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says that when the owl would
boast he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole. Shakespeare would
have understood this. Milton would have made him talk like an eagle. His
influence is not to be left out of account as partially contributing to
that decline toward poetic diction which was already beginning ere he
died. If it would not be fair to say that he is the most artistic, he may
be called in the highest sense the most scientific of our poets. If to
Spenser younger poets have gone to be sung-to, they have sat at the feet
of Milton to be taught.
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