apt numbers" he probably meant the skilful handling of
stress-variation in relation to the sense. But the last of the three is
the essential of Miltonic blank verse. There lies the secret for whoso
can divine it.

Every well-marked type of blank verse has a natural gait or movement of
its own, which it falls into during its ordinary uninspired moods.
Tennyson's blank verse, when it is not carefully guarded and varied,
drops into a kind of fluent sing-song. Examples may be taken, almost at
random, from the _Idylls of the King_. Here is one:--

So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,
But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord.

The elements of musical delight here are almost barbarous in their
simplicity. There is a surfeit of assonance--_all, shore, shore, lord_;
_heart, Arthur_; _ways, safe, pain_. The alliteration is without
complexity,--a dreary procession of sibilants. Worst of all are the
monotonous incidence of the stress, and the unrelieved, undistinguished,
crowded poverty of the Saxon monosyllables.

No two such consecutive lines were ever written by Milton. His verse,
even in its least admirable passages, does not sing, nor trip with
regular alternate stress; its movement suggests neither dance nor song,
but rather the advancing march of a body of troops skilfully handled,
with incessant changes in their disposition as they pass over broken
ground. He can furnish them with wings when it so pleases him. No
analysis of his prosody can explain the wonders of his workmanship. But
it is not idle to ask for a close attention to the scansion of lines like
these, wherein he describes the upward progress of the Son of God and his
escort after the Creation:--

The heavens and all the constellations rung,
The planets in their station listening stood,
While the bright pomp ascended jubilant.

In the last line the first four words marshal the great procession in
solid array; the last two lift it high into the empyrean. Let any one
attempt to get the same upward effect with a stress, however light, laid
on the last syllable of the line, or with words of fewer than three
syllables apiece, and he will have to confess that, however abstruse the
rules of its working may be, there is virtue in metrical cunning. The
passage in the Seventh Book from which these lines are quoted would
justify an entire treatise. The five regular alternate stresses first
occur in a line describing the progress over the wide plai