golden light, and musical as
the strings of Memnon's harp!

Again, nothing can be more magnificent than the portrait of Beelzebub:

"With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies:"

Or the comparison of Satan, as he "lay floating many a rood," to "that sea
beast,"

"Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream!"

What a force of imagination is there in this last expression! What an idea
it conveys of the size of that hugest of created beings, as if it shrunk
up the ocean to a stream, and took up the sea in its nostrils as a very
little thing! Force of style is one of Milton's greatest excellences.
Hence, perhaps, he stimulates us more in the reading, and less afterwards.
The way to defend Milton against all impugners, is to take down the book
and read it.

Milton's blank verse is the only blank verse in the language (except
Shakspeare's) that deserves the name of verse. Dr. Johnson, who had
modelled his ideas of versification on the regular sing-song of Pope,
condemns the Paradise Lost as harsh and unequal. I shall not pretend to
say that this is not sometimes the case; for where a degree of excellence
beyond the mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poet must sometimes
fail. But I imagine that there are more perfect examples in Milton of
musical expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and movement of the
verse to the meaning of the passage, than in all our other writers,
whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the exception already
mentioned). Spenser is the most harmonious of our stanza writers, as
Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our rhymists. But in neither is
there anything like the same ear for music, the same power of
approximating the varieties of poetical to those of musical rhythm, as
there is in our great epic poet. The sound of his lines is moulded into
the expression of the sentiment, almost of the very image. They rise or
fall, pause or hurry rapidly on, with exquisite art, but without the least
trick or affectation, as the occasion seems to require.

The following are some of the finest instances:

"His hand was known
In Heaven by many a tower'd structure high;--
Nor was his name unheard or unador'd
In ancient Greece; and in the Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber; and how he fell
From Heaven, they fabled, thrown by angry Jove
Sheer o'er the crystal battl