how the attention is seized by that magnificent line of arresting
mono-syllables, each heavy with the sense of fate--

"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold!"

It used to be said that Milton uses mono-syllables to express slowness
of action. But that is notably not the case here. And in the main it
seems that he uses them, as Shakspeare often did, for expressing the
solemnity of grave crisis, or for deep emotion, when anything fanciful,
ornate or verbose would be fatal to the simplicity, akin to silence,
which all men find fitting at great moments. So Shakspeare makes Kent
say at Lear's death--

"Vex not his ghost; O let him pass! he hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer."

And so Milton uses these tremendous mono-syllables, like a bell tolling
into the silence of midnight, to force our attention on the doom of all
the world that took its beginning when Satan entered Paradise--

{167}

"So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold."

So again, with less solemnity as befitting a less awful person but
still with arresting and delaying emphasis, he records the actual
eating of the fatal apple--

"she plucked, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
That all was lost."

So he suspends the flow of the richest and most elaborate of his
similes by the slow-moving monosyllables of

"which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world:"

So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all politics, of his debate in
hell:

"And that must end us; that must be our cure--
To be no more:"

So again he closes the first Act of _Paradise Regained_ with a verse of
solitary awe--

"And now wild beasts come forth the woods to roam."

{168}

But to return to the similes. Milton uses them, as we have seen, to
introduce things familiar and contemporary into the remote and majestic
theme of his poem. But he also uses them to introduce the whole world
into Eden, all later history into the beginning of the world, all the
varied glories of art and war, poetry and legend, with which his memory
was stored, into an action which was only partly human and provided no
scope at all for any human activities except of the most primitive
order. So the palace of Hell is, he tells us, something far beyond the
magnificence of "Babylon, or great Alcairo"; and the army