of a poet. His sentences rarely conform to any
strict periodic model; each idea, as it occurs to him, brings with it a
train of variation and enrichment, which, by the time the sentence
closes, is often found in sole possession. The architecture depends on
melody rather than on logic. The emphasis and burden of the thought
generally hangs on the epithets, descriptive terms, and phrases, which he
strengthens by arranging them in pairs, after a fashion much practised by
poets. Thus, to take a few examples from the Divorce pamphlets, a wife,
who should be "an intimate and speaking help," "a ready and reviving
associate," to comfort "the misinformed and wearied life of man" with "a
sweet and gladsome society," is too often "a mute and spiritless mate,"
united to her husband in "a disconsolate and unenjoined matrimony,"
whereby the blessing that was expected with her is changed "into a
familiar and coinhabiting mischief, at least into a drooping and
disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption." "The
mystical and blessed union of marriage can be no way more unhallowed and
profaned, than by the forcible uniting of such disunions and
separations." "And it is a less breach of wedlock to part with wise and
quiet consent betimes, than still to foil and profane that mystery of joy
and union with a polluting sadness and perpetual distemper."

The balance of epithet, the delicate music, the sentence that resembles a
chain with link added to link rather than a hoop whose ends are welded
together by the hammer--these are the characteristics of Milton's prose.
They are illustrated in that short passage of the _Areopagitica_, well
known to all readers of English: "I cannot praise a fugitive and
cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and
seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal
garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat." Or in the striking
description of London during the Civil War: "Behold now this vast city, a
city of refuge, the mansion-house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded
with his protection; the shop of war hath not there more anvils and
hammers working, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed
justice in defence of beleaguered truth, than there be pens and heads
there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new
notions and ideas wherewith to present, as with their homage and their
fealty, the approaching r