n the second place, we must note the sublimity of treatment. Milton's
own mind was cast in a sublime mold. This quality of mind is evident
even in his figures of rhetoric. The Milky Way appears to him as the
royal highway to heaven:--

"A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars."[3]

When Death and Satan meet, Milton wishes the horror of the scene to
manifest something of the sublime. What other poet could, in fewer
words, have conveyed a stronger impression of the effect of the frown
of those powers?

"So frowned the mighty combatants, that Hell
Grew darker at their frown."[4]

George Saintsbury's verdict is approved by the majority of the
greatest modern critics of Milton: "In loftiness--sublimity of
thought, and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost
superhuman pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante."

Mastery of Verse.--Milton's verse, especially in _Paradise Lost_, is
such a symphony of combined rhythm, poetic expression, and thought; it
is so harmonious, so varied, and yet so apparently simple in its
complexity, that it has never been surpassed in kind.

His mastery of rhythm is not so evident in a single line as in a group
of lines. The first sentence in _Paradise Lost_ contains sixteen
lines, and yet the rhythm, the pauses, and the thought are so combined
as to make oral reading easy and the meaning apparent. The conception
of the music of the spheres in their complex orbits finds some analogy
in the harmony of the combined rhythmical units of his verse.

Denied the use of his eyes as a guide to the form of his later verse,
he must have repeated aloud these groups of lines and changed them
until their cadence satisfied his remarkably musical ear. Lines like
these show the melody of which this verse is capable:--

"Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving."[5]

To begin with, he had, like Shakespeare and Keats an instinctive
feeling for the poetic value of words and phrases. Milton's early
poems abound in such poetic expressions as "the frolic wind," "the
slumbring morn," "linked sweetness," "looks commercing with the
skies," "dewy-feathered sleep," "the studious cloister's pale," "a dim
religious light," the "silver lining" of the cloud, "west winds with
musky wing," "the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." His poetic
instinct enabled him to take common prosaic words and, by merely
changing the positio