When Death and Satan meet, Milton wishes the horror of the scene to manifest something of the sublime. What other poet could, in fewer words, have conveyed a stronger impression of the effect of the frown of those powers?
"So frowned the mighty combatants, that Hell
Grew darker at their frown."[4]
George Saintsbury's verdict is approved by the majority of the greatest modern critics of Milton: "In loftiness—sublimity of thought, and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost superhuman pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante."
Mastery of Verse.—Milton's verse, especially in Paradise Lost, is such a symphony of combined rhythm, poetic expression, and thought; it is so harmonious, so varied, and yet so apparently simple in its complexity, that it has never been surpassed in kind.
His mastery of rhythm is not so evident in a single line as in a group of lines. The first sentence in Paradise Lost contains sixteen lines, and yet the rhythm, the pauses, and the thought are so combined as to make oral reading easy and the meaning apparent. The conception of the music of the spheres in their complex orbits finds some analogy in the harmony of the combined rhythmical units of his verse.
Denied the use of his eyes as a guide to the form of his later verse, he must have repeated aloud these groups of lines and changed them until their cadence satisfied his remarkably musical ear. Lines like these show the melody of which this verse is capable:—
"Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving."[5]
To begin with, he had, like Shakespeare and Keats an instinctive feeling for the poetic value of words and phrases. Milton's early poems abound in such poetic expressions as "the frolic wind," "the slumbring morn," "linkèd sweetness," "looks commercing with the skies," "dewy-feathered sleep," "the studious cloister's pale," "a dim religious light," the "silver lining" of the cloud, "west winds with musky wing," "the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." His poetic instinct enabled him to take common prosaic words and, by merely changing the position of the adjective, transmute them into imperishable verse. His "darkness visible" and "human face divine" are instances of this power.
[Illustration: MILTON DICTATING PARADISE LOST TO HIS DAUGHTERS. From the painting by Munkacsy.]
Twentieth century criticism is more fully recognizing the debt of subsequent poetic literature to Milton. Saintsbury writes:—