Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly muse.
So chary of a sentence is he, so resolute not to let it escape him till he has crowded into it all he can, that it is not till the thirty-ninth word in the sentence that he will give us the key to it, the word of action, the verb. Milton says:
O for that warning voice, which he, who saw
The Apocalypse, heard cry in heaven aloud.
He is not satisfied, unless he can tell us, all in one sentence, and without permitting himself to actually mention the name, that the man who had the warning voice was the same man who saw the Apocalypse. Homer would have said, ‘O for that warning voice, which John heard’—and if it had suited him to say that John also saw the Apocalypse, he would have given us that in another sentence. The effect of this allusive and compressed manner of Milton is, I need not say, often very powerful; and it is an effect which other great poets have often sought to obtain much in the same way: Dante is full of it, Horace is full of it; but wherever it exists, it is always an un-Homeric effect. ‘The losses of the heavens’, says Horace, ‘fresh moons speedily repair; we, when we have gone down where the pious Æneas, where the rich Tullus and Ancus are,—pulvis et umbra sumus[[26]]’. He never actually says where we go to; he only indicates it by saying that it is that place where Æneas, Tullus, and Ancus are. But Homer, when he has to speak of going down to the grave, says, definitely, ἐς Ἐλύσιοv πεδιον—ἀθάνατοι πέμψουσιν[[27]],—‘The immortals shall send thee to the Elysian plain’; and it is not till after he has definitely said this, that he adds, that it is there that the abode of departed worthies is placed: ὅθι ξανθὸς Ῥαδάμανθυς—‘Where the yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is’. Again; Horace, having to say that punishment sooner or later overtakes crime, says it thus:
Raro antecedentem scelestum