a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he might have twitted him with "a _seq_uent king who seeks." As for the sh sound, a poet could hardly have found it ungracious to his ear who wrote,
"Gna_sh_ing for angui_sh_ and despite and _sh_ame,"
or again,
"Then bursting forth
Afre_sh_ with con_sc_ious terrors vex me round
That rest or intermi_ssion_ none I find.
Before mine eyes in oppos_ition_ sits
Grim Death, my son."
And if Milton disliked the ch sound, he gave his ears unnecessary pain by verses such as these,—
"Straight cou_ch_es close; then, rising, _ch_anges oft
His cou_ch_ant wat_ch_, as one who _ch_ose his ground";
still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless chief."[369] The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than a melodist. There are, no doubt, some exquisite melodies (like the "Sabrina Fair ") among his earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case in an age which produced or trained the authors of our best English glees, as ravishing in their instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in the "Nativity Ode," in the "Solemn Music," and in "Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards metrical construction, than anything that had thrilled the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that Milton was great and original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's fondness for dilatation as respects thoughts and images. In Milton it extends to the language also, and often to the single words of which a period is composed. He loved phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages that stamp him great, the verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather with resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is true that he is cunning in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell in his orchestra without being obvious, but it is in the more scientific region of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist and a master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with misleading intervals between and unobviously in his blank-verse:—
"There rest, if any rest can harbour there;
And, reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how re_pair_,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from des_pair_."[370]
There is one almost perfect quatrain,—
"Before thy fellows, ambitious to win
From me some plume, that thy success may show
Destruction to the rest. This pause between
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know";