esses; he
never violates harmony of sound or sense; his poems have all their
regular movement from quiet beginning through a rising and breaking wave
of passion and splendour to quiet close. His art is nowhere better seen
than in his endings.

Is it _Lycidas_? After the thunder of approaching vengeance on the
hireling shepherds of the Church, comes sunset and quiet:

"And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

Is it _Paradise Lost_? After the agonies of expulsion and the flaming
sword--

"Some natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The world was all before them where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide;
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."

Is it finally _Samson Agonistes_?

"His servants he with new acquist,
Of true experience from this great event,
With peace and consolation hath dismist,
And calm of mind all passion spent."

"Calm of mind, all passion spent," it is the essence of Milton's art.

He worked in large ideas and painted splendid canvases; it was
necessary for him to invent a style which should be capable of sustained
and lofty dignity, which should be ornate enough to maintain the
interest of the reader and charm him and at the same time not so ornate
as to give an air of meretricious decoration to what was largely and
simply conceived. Particularly it was necessary for him to avoid those
incursions of vulgar associations which words carelessly used will bring
in their train. He succeeded brilliantly in this difficult task. The
unit of the Miltonic style is not the phrase but the word, each word
fastidiously chosen, commonly with some air of an original and lost
meaning about it, and all set in a verse in which he contrived by an
artful variation of pause and stress to give the variety which other
writers had from rhyme. In this as in his structure he accomplished what
the Renaissance had only dreamed. Though he had imitators (the poetic
diction of the age following is modelled on him) he had no followers. No
one has been big enough to find his secret since.

CHAPTER V

THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE

The student of literature, when he passes in his reading from the age of
Shakespeare and Milton to that of Dryden and Pope, will be conscious of
certain sharply defi