ith its own peculiar association, and yet each
detail is strictly subordinate to the general effect. No poet of
Milton's rank, probably, has been equally indebted to his predecessors,
not only for his vocabulary, but for his thoughts. Reminiscences throng
upon him, and he takes all that comes, knowing that he can make it
lawfully his own. The comparison of Satan's shield to the moon, for
instance, is borrowed from the similar comparison of the shield of
Achilles in the Iliad, but what goes in Homer comes out Milton. Homer
merely says that the huge and massy shield emitted a lustre like that of
the moon in heaven. Milton heightens the resemblance by giving the
shield shape, calls in the telescope to endow it with what would seem
preternatural dimensions to the naked eye, and enlarges even these by
the suggestion of more than the telescope can disclose--

"His ponderous shield,
Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening, from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe."

Thus does Milton appropriate the wealth of past literature, secure of
being able to recoin it with his own image and superscription. The
accumulated learning which might have choked the native fire of a
feebler spirit was but nourishment to his. The polished stones and
shining jewels of his superb mosaic are often borrowed, but its plan and
pattern are his own.

One of the greatest charms of "Paradise Lost" is the incomparable metre,
which, after Coleridge and Tennyson have done their utmost, remains
without equal in our language for the combination of majesty and music.
It is true that this majesty is to a certain extent inherent in the
subject, and that the poet who could rival it would scarcely be well
advised to exert his power to the full unless his theme also rivalled
the magnificence of Milton's. Milton, on his part, would have been quite
content to have written such blank verse as Wordsworth's "Yew Trees," or
as the exordium of "Alastor," or as most of Coleridge's idylls, had his
subject been less than epical. The organ-like solemnity of his verbal
music is obtained partly by extreme attention to variety of pause, but
chiefly, as Wordsworth told Klopstock, and as Mr. Addington Symonds
points out more at le