ission of articles, of reversing the position of
adjectives and adverbs, are specially Miltonic. Certainly Milton often
indulges in them; yet in the same way the most random dipping will find
passages (and any number of them) where no one of these habits is
particularly or eminently present, and yet which every one would recognise
as Miltonic. As far as it is possible to put the finger on one peculiarity
which explains part of the secret of Milton's pre-eminence, I should myself
select his unapproached care and felicity in building what may be called
the verse-paragraph. The dangers of blank verse (Milton's preference for
which over rhyme was only one of his numerous will-worships) are many; but
the two greatest lie in easily understood directions. With the sense
generally or frequently ending as the line ends (as may be seen in the
early dramatists and in many bad poets since), it becomes intolerably stiff
and monotonous. With the process of _enjambement_ or overlapping,
promiscuously and unskilfully indulged (the commonest fault during the last
two centuries), it is apt to degenerate into a kind of metrical and barely
metrical prose, distinguished from prose proper by less variety of cadence,
and by an occasional awkward sacrifice of sense and natural arrangement to
the restrictions which the writer accepts, but by which he knows not how to
profit. Milton has avoided both these dangers by adhering to what I have
ventured to call the verse-paragraph--that is to say, by arranging the
divisions of his sense in divisions of verse, which, albeit identical and
not different in their verse integers, are constructed with as much
internal concerted variety as the stanzas or strophes of a so-called
Pindaric ode. Of the apparently uniform and monotonous blank verse he has
made an instrument of almost protean variety by availing himself of the
infinite permutations of cadence, syllabic sound, variety of feet, and
adjustment of sense to verse. The result is that he has, it may almost be
said, made for himself out of simple blank verse all the conveniences of
the line, the couplet, and the stanza, punctuating and dividing by cadence,
not rhyme. No device that is possible within his limits--even to that most
dangerous one of the pause after the first syllable of a line which has
"enjambed" from the previous one--is strange to him, or sparingly used by
him, or used without success. And it is only necessary to contrast his
verse with the