it is not only of Samson, but of the Ironsides that the poet thinks. Nor is it only Samson who finds himself

Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,

Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!

It is from Milton's very heart that the cry comes:

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!

O first created beam, and thou great Word,
"Let there be light, and light was over all";
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
The Sun to me is dark

And silent as the Moon,
When she deserts the night,

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.
Since light so necessary is to life,
And almost life itself, if it be true
That light is in the soul,

She all in every part; why was this sight
To such a tender ball as the eye confined,
So obvious and so easy to be quenched?
And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused,
That she might look at will through every pore?
Then had I not been thus exiled from light,
As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried; but O, yet more miserable!
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave
Buried, yet not exempt,

By privilege of death and burial,

From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs:
But made hereby obnoxious more

To all the miseries of life,

Life in captivity

Among inhuman foes.

For though Milton lived not among enemies, he lived friendless. His self-centred nature repelled and did not attract. In his own house, his wife tended him carefully, but his daughters desired his death, and cheated him. Their conduct was in

Milton treated

excusable, yet they had an excuse. them as serfs; taught them to read to him in foreign languages, but would not teach them to understand what they read, "saying with a gibe that one tongue was enough for a woman." Like the rest of men, he forged his own punishment; but his vices were not those which receive reprobation. Hard, narrow, cruel, malignant and scurrilous in controversy, without tolerance for any way of thought or life but his own, he stands for what is least lovable in greatness.

Of his greatness there is no question. His imagination created worlds, shaped cosmic systems in gloom and radiance; figured in glory the multitude of angels, the hosts of hell, their dwellingplaces, their deeds, their discourse, lifting at every point his theme, as one might say, above human range. And the power to conceive was matched with a technical skill unequalled perhaps by any poet in any tongue. He can make words sound like silver trumpets when a voice rises :

Powers and dominions, deities of heaven;

he can paint at once the aspect and the very spirit of things:

Seest thou yon dreary plain forlorn and wild,
The seat of desolation, void of light,

Save what the glimmering of these livid flames
Casts pale and dreadful?

he can, like every master in this kind, suggest sound with words:

The sulphurous hail,

Shot after us in storm o'erblown, hath laid
The fiery surge that from the precipice
Of heaven received us falling; and the thunder,
Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
To bellow through the vast and boundless deep.

One can hear the tossing reverberation in the last line; and note how Milton places the word "thunder," so that the voice must, lingering on it, draw out its natural quality of suggestion. But it is often by less obvious means that his effects are obtained. Take such a line as

Over heaven's high towers to force resistless way.

Here the verse struggles with the syllables: the words cannot be said "trippingly on the tongue.' Or again, in Book VI., the overthrow of Satan's army "into the wasteful deep" is thus described:

Headlong themselves they throw

Down from the verge of heaven; eternal wrath
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.

The last line can only be spoken if a tremendous stress is laid on the word 'burnt,' giving it the time of two or three syllables; the whole force of the sentence concentrates upon it as the thundercloud on the thin flame of the lightning. It must always be remembered that in Milton's hands the blank verse is not a thing of regular and obvious scansion by common iambics. Such line as

Shoots in | visib | le vir | tue even | to the deep may be scanned as marked here; or thus:

Shoots in visible | virtue | even | to the deep;

but it must in any case contain two feet consisting of three syllables spoken in the time normally allowed for two.

Of what can be felt rather than described — the harmony of certain vowel combinations, the magic of pregnant and sonorous words—one may give for

conclusion a few examples: first this of the architect of Satan's palace:

In Ausonian land

Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer over the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

A summer's day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star,
On Lemnos the Aegean isle.

Note how the lapse of those hours is suggested "a summer's day," with its slow progress; note also the exquisite vowel music of the last lines and the effect of the beautiful word "zenith." Say instead

Fell from high heaven like a falling star,

and you have a good line; but compare it with Milton's! It is notable too that for the height of this mastery one can turn to Paradise Regained; and the last passage quoted shall be an example of pure virtuosity, taken from his description of the temptation by food.

And at a stately sideboard, by the wine

That fragrant smell diffus'd, in order stood
Tall stripling youths rich clad, of fairer hue
Than Ganymed or Hylas; distant more
Under the trees now tripp'd, now solemn stood,
Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades,

With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn,
And ladies of the Hesperides, that seem'd
Fairer than feign'd of old, or fabled since
Of faery damsels, met in forest wide
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore.

Listen to the music of the names, feel the magic of their dim and beautiful associations, and you will recognise in these things the hand of perhaps the greatest of all craftsmen in verse.

CHAPTER VII

PURITANISM AND THE REACTION

IT is characteristic of Milton's orbed isolation that he neither belonged to nor founded a school. Among his intimates was only one man of note in letters, Andrew Marvel, who in the last years of the Protectorate was adjoined to Milton as assistant secretary. Yet, though Marvel belonged to the Puritans in politics and religion he shows nothing of the Puritan in his literature, save in his choice of subjects. Of the three noble lyrics by which he survives, one is the Horatian Ode on Cromwell, a second the song of the Pilgrim Fathers, "Where the remote Bermoothes ride In the ocean's bosom

unespied.' A third, The Garden, betrays more fully his true affinity in literature. Marvel might write stanzas to the author of Paradise Lost ("When I behold the poet blind yet bold "), but his own master was the royalist Abraham Cowley. Cowley had succeeded Donne as chief of what has been called the " metaphysical school "-poets who revelled in strange conceits drawn from unlikely sources of knowledge. There is a trace of this mannerism in these famous lines from The Garden:

Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness;