No. 11.] ON MILTON’S VERSIFICATION [Aug. 20, 1815.
Milton’s works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn to Fame. His religious zeal infused its character into his imagination; and he devotes himself with the same sense of duty to the cultivation of his genius, as he did to the exercise of virtue, or the good of his country. He does not write from casual impulse, but after a severe examination of his own strength, and with a determination to leave nothing undone which it is in his power to do. He always labours, and he almost always succeeds. He strives to say the finest things in the world, and he does say them. He adorns and dignifies his subject to the utmost. He surrounds it with all the possible associations of beauty or grandeur, whether moral, or physical, or intellectual. He refines on his descriptions of beauty, till the sense almost aches at them, and raises his images of terror to a gigantic elevation, that ‘makes Ossa like a wart.’ He has a high standard, with which he is constantly comparing himself, and nothing short of which can satisfy him:
——‘Sad task, yet argument
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued,
If answerable stile I can obtain.
——Unless an age too late, or cold
Climate, or years, damp my intended wing.’
Milton has borrowed more than any other writer; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer. The power of his mind is stamped on every line. He is a writer of centos, and yet in originality only inferior to Homer. The quantity of art shews the strength of his genius; so much art would have overloaded any other writer. Milton’s learning has all the effect of intuition. He describes objects of which he had only read in books, with the vividness of actual observation. His imagination has the force of nature. He makes words tell as pictures:
‘Him followed Rimmon, whose delightful seat