The hidden soul of harmony.”
But here is the realm of Milton’s mastery. He electrifies the mind through conductors. His words, as Macaulay declares, are charmed. Their meaning bears no proportion to their effect. “No sooner are they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying ‘Open Wheat,’ ‘Open Barley,’ to the door which obeyed no sound but ‘Open Sesame.’”
The force and significance which Milton can infuse into the simplest word are strikingly shown in his description of the largest of land animals, in “Paradise Lost.” In a single line the unwieldy monster is so represented as coming from the ground, that we almost involuntarily start aside from fear of being crushed by the living mass:—
“Behemoth, the biggest born of earth, upheaved
His vastness.”
Note, again, that passage in which Death at hell-gates threatens the Arch-Fiend, Satan:—
“Back to thy punishment,
False fugitive! and to thy speed add wings,
Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue
Thy lingering,—or, with one stroke of this dart,