ke the path to Heaven
To help you find them.

This has all the technical marks of late Elizabethan dramatic blank
verse: "vision" as a trisyllable; the redundant syllable in the middle of
the line; the colloquial abbreviation of "in the"; not to mention the
fanciful vein of the whole passage, which might lead any one unacquainted
with Milton to look for this quotation among the dramas of the prime. The
great hyperbolical strain of the Elizabethans, which so often broke into
rant, is caught and nobly echoed in praise of virtue:--

If this fail,
The pillared firmament is rottenness
And earth's base built on stubble.

Or, to take a last example of Milton's earlier style, this description of
the Lady's singing is in marked contrast to the later matured manner:--

At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound
Rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes,
And stole upon the air, that even Silence
Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
Deny her nature, and be never more
Still to be so displaced. I was all ear,
And took in strains that might create a soul
Under the ribs of Death.

This has the happy audacity of Shakespeare, and his delight in playing
with logic; it is almost witty. The Miltonic audacity of the later poems
is far less diffuse and playful. When the nightingale sings, in _Paradise
Lost_, "Silence was pleased." When Adam begs the Angel to tell the story
of the Creation, he adds, "Sleep, listening to thee, will watch." Either
of these paradoxes would have been tormented and elaborated into a puzzle
by a true Elizabethan.

Milton, then, began as a pupil of the dramatists. But his tendencies and
ambitions were not dramatic, so he escaped the diseases that afflicted
the drama in its decadence. When he began to write blank verse, the blank
verse of the dramatists, his contemporaries, was fast degenerating into
more or less rhythmical prose. Suckling and Davenant and their fellows
not only used the utmost license of redundant syllables at the end of the
line, but hustled and slurred the syllables in the middle till the line
was a mere gabble, and interspersed broken lines so plentifully that it
became impossible even for the most attentive ear to follow the metre. A
brief description of a Puritan waiting-woman may be taken as an
illustration from Jasper Mayne's comedy of _The City Match_ (1639). As a
sample of blank verse it is perhaps somewhat smoother and more reg