should we be surprised to come upon these elemental loves and joys heralding a new reign of justice and peace in the Prometheus Unbound?
But neither Keats nor Shelley, who both had their affinities to Milton, had it in him to reach the concentrated Miltonic energy of such lines as—
"The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,"
or—
"Than his bright throne or burning axletree could bear."
Almost every one of these final Alexandrines, it is to be observed, sums up the note of its stanza in a chord of majestic power. They are the most Miltonic lines in the poem; for it is precisely "majesty" {103} which is the unique and essential Miltonic quality; and Dryden in the famous epigram ought to have kept it for him and not given it to Virgil, though by doing so he would have made his splendid compliment impossible.
Among the poems that followed in the 1645 edition were the Passion, a failure which Milton recognized as a failure and abandoned, but yet, characteristically, did not refuse to publish; the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, which, still youthful as it is and is seen to be by the frigid and false antithesis of Queen and Marchioness with which it ends, has yet very beautiful lines—
"Gentle Lady, may thy grave
Peace and quiet ever have!
After this thy travail sore,
Sweet rest seize thee evermore";
the famous lines on Shakspeare, contributed anonymously to the second Folio; and the noble outburst of heavenly music which begins—
"Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy
Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse."