The verse, in this exquisitely modulated passage, floats up and down as if it had itself wings. Milton has himself given us the theory of his versification.
‘In many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out.’
Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton’s,—Thomson’s, Young’s, Cowper’s, Wordsworth’s,—and it will be found, from the want of the same insight into ‘the hidden soul of harmony,’ to be mere lumbering prose.
W. H.
To the President of The Round Table.
Sir,—It is somewhat remarkable, that in Pope’s Essay on Criticism (not a very long poem) there are no less than half a score couplets rhyming to the word sense.
‘But of the two, less dangerous is the offence,
To tire our patience than mislead our sense.’—lines 3, 4.
‘In search of wit these lose their common sense,