ght, hovering beyond hovering, as he gets nearer and
nearer to the Sun.

It is by single paragraphs, all the same, and by single lines, that I
would myself prefer to see him judged. Long poems have been
written before and will be written again, but no one will ever
write--no one but Dante has ever written--such single lines as one reads
in Milton. Curiously enough, some of the most staggering of these
superb passages are interludes and allusions, rather than integral
episodes in the story, and not only interludes, but interludes in the
"pagan manner." Second only to those Luciferan defiances, which
seem able to inspire even us poor worms with the right attitude
towards Fate, I am tempted to place certain references to Astarte,
Ashtoreth and Adonis.

"Astarte, queen of Heaven, with crescent horns,
To whose bright Image nightly, by the moon,
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs."

Or of Adonis:

"Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a Summer's day--"

That single line, "Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured," seems
to me better than any other that could be quoted, to evoke the awe
and the thrill and the seduction of all true poetry.

Then those great mysterious allusions to the planetary orbits and the
fixed stars and the primeval spaces of land and sea; what a power
they have of spreading wide before us the huge horizons of the
world's edge! Who can forget "the fleecy star that bears Andromeda
far off Atlantic seas"? Or that phrase about the sailors "stemming
mightly to the pole"? Or the sudden terror of that guarded Paradisic
Gate--"with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms"? The same
extraordinary beauty of single passages may be found in "Paradise
Regained," a poem which is much finer than many guess. The
descriptions there of the world-cities, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem,
have the same classic thrill of reserved awe and infinite reverence
that some of Dante's lines possess--only, with Milton, the thing is
longer drawn out and more grandiloquent. Satan's speech about his
own implacable fatality, "his harbour, and his ultimate repose," and
that allusion to Our Lord's gentleness, like "the cool intermission of
a summer's cloud" are both in the manner we love.

It is only, however, when one comes to Samson Agonistes that the
full power of Milton's genius is felt. Written in a style which the
devotees of "free ve