rent. It is difficult to
believe that this is the same metre which Waller and Dryden {105} were
soon, amid universal applause, to file down into the smooth monotony
of--

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?"

For Dryden, as still more for Pope and the school of Pope, the thing to
accomplish, so far as possible, is to prevent any of the natural
accents falling upon the third, fifth or other odd syllables; there is,
for instance, not one which does so in the first fifty lines of
_Absalom and Achitophel_ or of the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_. The object
of Milton, on the contrary, is to vary the position of his accents to
the utmost possible extent compatible with the preservation of the
verse. In these four lines his first accent falls on the first
syllable in the first two, probably on the fourth in the third, and on
the second in the last. And the other accents are similarly varied in
place and, it may be added, in number. In Milton's case the listener's
wonder is at the number and intricacy of the variations he can play
upon the theme of his verse; in Pope's it is at the amazing cleverness
with which it can be exactly repeated in {106} different words.
Milton's music, too, is continuous, not broken into couplets sharply
divided from each other. His verses pass into each other as wave melts
into wave on the sea-shore; there is a constant breaking on the beach,
but which will break and which will glide imperceptibly into its
successor we cannot guess though we sit watching for an hour; the
sameness of rise and fall, crash and silence, is unbroken, yet no one
wave is exactly like its predecessor, no two successive minutes give
either eye or ear exactly the same experience. So with Milton's verse;
even the ocean of _Paradise Lost_ has few or no waves of music of more
varied unity, of more continuous variety than such lines as--

"As once we did, till disproportioned sin
Jarred against Nature's chime and with harsh din
Broke the fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed
In perfect diapason whilst they stood
In first obedience and their state of good."

The chief remaining minor poems of Milton are the _Allegro_ and
_Penseroso_, _Comus_, _Lycidas_ and the Sonnets. The two first are
written {107} in those