ngth, by the period, not the individual line, being
made the metrical unit, "so that each line in a period shall carry its
proper burden of sound, but the burden shall be differently distributed
in the successive verses." Hence lines which taken singly seem almost
unmetrical, in combination with their associates appear indispensable
parts of the general harmony. Mr. Symonds gives some striking instances.
Milton's versification is that of a learned poet, profound in thought
and burdened with the further care of ordering his thoughts: it is
therefore only suited to sublimity of a solemn or meditative cast, and
most unsuitable to render the unstudied sublimity of Homer. Perhaps no
passage is better adapted to display its dignity, complicated artifice,
perpetual retarding movement, concerted harmony, and grave but ravishing
sweetness than the description of the coming on of Night in the Fourth
Book:--

"Now came still evening on, and twilight grey
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus that led
The stary host rose brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw."

How exquisite the indication of the pauseless continuity of the
nightingale's song by the transition from short sentences, cut up by
commas and semicolons, to the "linked sweetness long drawn out" of "She
all night long her amorous descant sung"! The poem is full of similar
felicities, none perhaps more noteworthy than the sequence of
monosyllables that paints the enormous bulk of the prostrate Satan:--

"So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay."

It is a most interesting subject for inquiry from what sources, other
than the Scriptures, Milton drew aid in the composition of "Paradise
Lost." The most striking counterpart is Calderon, to whom he owed as
little as Calderon can have owed to him. "El Magico Prodigioso," already
cited as affording a remarkable parallel to "Comus," though performed in
1637, was not printed until 1663, when "Paradise Lost" was already
completed.[8] The two great religious poets have naturally conceived the
Evil One