ltonic energy of such lines
as--

"The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,"

or--

"Than his bright throne or burning axletree could bear."

Almost every one of these final Alexandrines, it is to be observed,
sums up the note of its stanza in a chord of majestic power. They are
the most Miltonic lines in the poem; for it is precisely "majesty"
{103} which is the unique and essential Miltonic quality; and Dryden in
the famous epigram ought to have kept it for him and not given it to
Virgil, though by doing so he would have made his splendid compliment
impossible.

Among the poems that followed in the 1645 edition were the _Passion_, a
failure which Milton recognized as a failure and abandoned, but yet,
characteristically, did not refuse to publish; the _Epitaph on the
Marchioness of Winchester_, which, still youthful as it is and is seen
to be by the frigid and false antithesis of Queen and Marchioness with
which it ends, has yet very beautiful lines--

"Gentle Lady, may thy grave
Peace and quiet ever have!
After this thy travail sore,
Sweet rest seize thee evermore";

the famous lines on Shakspeare, contributed anonymously to the second
Folio; and the noble outburst of heavenly music which begins--

"Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy
Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse."

{104} This was written some years later; and even after _Paradise Lost_
it may rank as the most daring and entirely successful of Milton's
long-sustained wheelings of musical flight. The stanza no longer
provides him with space enough: and here his whole twenty-eight lines
are one continuous strain, with no break in them and scarcely any
pause, in ten-syllabled lines of boldly varied rhyme and accent. His
task here is not so difficult as it was to be in _Paradise Lost_, for
he has rhyme to provide him with variety and he admits two verses of
six syllables among his twenty-eight; but already he is completely
master of the possibilities of the ten-syllable line, and can make it
yield as lavish a wealth of variety in unity as was later on to make
the great passages of _Paradise Lost_ an eternal amazement to lovers
and practisers of the art of verse.

"Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ,
Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
And to our high-raised phantasy present
That undisturbed song of pure concent."

They are all the same line, and yet how diffe