ening influence over the
return in the following lines to his own sad conditions. How smoothly
the complaint now goes: "The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon."
It is in comparison with the earlier abruptness as if he had gone
through something like the process of the psalmist, "until I went into
the sanctuary of God: then understood I" what had before been "too
painful for me." Then there is the comparatively unmarked rhythm of
the intellectual argumentative passage which follows: till emotion
begins again to overwhelm reflection, and shows itself in the strong
alliteration of "light," "land," "light," "live," "life," "living," and
in the strong caesura after "buried," the more marked for coming so
early in the verse.

Such poor noting of technicalities as this gives, of course, no more of
the secret of Milton's wonderful poetry than anatomy gives of the power
and beauty of the human body. But it has its interest and even its
use: provided that too much importance is not attributed to it and that
no one makes the mistake of the lady who, according to the story,
hopefully asked the painter what he mixed {227} his paints with, and
received the crushing reply, "With my brains, Madam."

_Samson Agonistes_ stands in marked contrast to its predecessor,
_Paradise Regained_. And not only in being a drama. Its intense
omnipresent emotion makes a still more important difference. In
passing from one to the other we pass from the least to the most
emotional of Milton's works. This would in any case have been a gain
for most readers: but the gain is made more important by the extreme
severity of Milton's final poetic manner. A style which excludes
almost all ornament stands in especial need of the support of a visibly
felt emotion. It has been said by a living writer that "when reason is
subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means of expression, and, when
emotion to reason, prose." This is roughly true, though the poetry of
mere emotion is poor stuff. The special faculty of the poet, as
Johnson well said, is that of joining music with reason. That is to
say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect
expression. They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new
single life, a unity. You cannot separate the emotion from the thought
in any great line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of the
"unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as
thought and memory in hi