It is apparent, therefore, how necessary to Milton were the concrete epic realities with which his poem deals,--the topographical scheme of things, and the definite embodiment of all his spiritual essences. Keats' Hyperion fails largely for want of an exact physical system such as Milton devises. Keats works almost wholly with vague Romantic suggestion, and there is nothing for the poem to hang on by. Something is happening; but it is difficult to say what, for we see only dream-imagery, and hear only muffled echoes. Had Milton made unsparing use of abstraction and suggestion, his poem would have fallen into windy chaos. The "philosophical poems" of his age did so fall. Henry More's Platonick Song of the Soul (1642), wherein are treated the Life of the Soul, her Immortality, the Sleep of the Soul, the Unity of Souls, and Memory after Death, is a dust-storm of verbiage. Such words as "calefaction," "exility," "self-reduplication," "tricentreity," "individuation," "circumvolution," "presentifick circularity," struggle and sprawl within the narrow room of the Spenserian stanza. Milton keeps us in better company than this, even in Hell. He uses abstract terms magnificently, but almost always with a reference to concrete realities, not as the names of separate entities. By the substitution of abstract nouns for concrete he achieves a wonderful effect of majesty. He does not name, for instance, the particular form of wind instrument that the heralds blew in Hell:--
Four speedy Cherubim
Put to their mouths the sounding alchymy.
He avoids defining his creatures by names that lend themselves to definite picture: of Death he says--
So spake the grisly Terror;
and he makes Raphael, at the call of Heaven's king, rise
from among
Thousand celestial Ardours.
In the Tenth Book, Death, snuffing the distant scent of mortality, becomes all nose--
So scented the grim Feature, and upturned