ressed,
When God into the hands of their deliverer
Puts invincible might.

To try to explain this marvel of beauty is to beat the air.

By his deliberate attention to the elements of verbal melody Milton gave
a new character to English blank verse. But this is not all. Quite as
important is the alteration that he made in the character of English
poetic diction.

The essence of the lyric is that it is made up of phrases, not of words.
The lines run easily because they run on tracks chosen for their ease by
the instinct of generations and worn smooth by use. The lyrical phrase,
when the first two or three words of it have been pronounced, finishes
itself. From Carew's "Ask me no more," with its long train of imitations,
to the latest banality of the music-halls, the songs that catch the ear
catch it by the same device. The lyric, that is to say, is almost always
dependent for its music on easy idiomatic turns of speech. The surprising
word occurs rarely; with all the greater effect inasmuch as it is
embedded in phrases that slip from the tongue without a trace of thought
or effort. These phrases naturally allow of little diversity of
intonation; they have the unity of a single word, a single accepted
emphasis, and a run of lightly-stressed syllables more or less musical in
sequence.

All this Milton changed. He chooses his every word. You cannot guess the
adjective from the substantive, nor the end of the phrase from its
beginning. He is much given to inverting the natural English order of
epithet and noun, that he may gain a greater emphasis for the epithet.
His style is not a simple loose-flowing garment, which takes its outline
from its natural fall over the figure, but a satin brocade, stiff with
gold, exactly fitted to the body. There is substance for it to clothe;
but, as his imitators quickly discovered, it can stand alone. He packs
his meaning into the fewest possible words, and studies economy in every
trifle. In his later poetry there are no gliding connectives; no
polysyllabic conjunctive clauses, which fill the mouth while the brain
prepares itself for the next word of value; no otiose epithets, and very
few that court neglect by their familiarity. His poetry is like the
eloquence of the Lord Chancellor Bacon, as described by Ben Jonson:--"No
man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered
less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his speech
but consisted of