his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look
aside from him, without loss." It is this quality of Milton's verse that
makes the exercise of reading it aloud a delight and a trial. Every word
is of value. There is no mortar between the stones, each is held in place
by the weight of the others, and helps to uphold the building. In
reading, every word must be rendered clearly and articulately; to drop
one out, or to slur it over, is to take a stone from an arch. Indeed, if
Lamb and Hazlitt are right in thinking that Shakespeare's greatest plays
cannot be acted, by the same token, Milton's greatest poems cannot be
read aloud. For his most sonorous passages the human voice is felt to be
too thin an instrument; the lightest word in the line demands some faint
emphasis, so that the strongest could not be raised to its true value
unless it were roared through some melodious megaphone.

The carefully jewelled mosaic style was practised very early by Milton.
It occurs already in the hymn on the Nativity:--

See how from far upon the eastern road
The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet:
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet.

The same deliberateness and gentle pause of words one after another
rounding and falling like clear drops is found in the song of the Spirit
in _Comus_:--

Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.

This is the effect which Sir Henry Wotton, Milton's earliest critic,
speaks of, in a letter to Milton, as "a certain Doric delicacy in your
songs and odes, whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing
parallel in our language."

There are poems, and good poems among the number, written on a more
diffuse principle. If you miss one line you find the idea repeated or
persisting in the next. It is quite possible to derive pleasure from the
_Faerie Queene_ by attending to the leading words, and, for the rest,
floating onward on the melody. You can catch the drift with ease. The
stream circles in so many eddies that to follow it laboriously throughout
its course is felt to be hardly necessary: miss it once and you can often
join it again at very near the same point. "But a reader of Milton," as
an early critic of Milton remarks, "must be always upon duty; he is
surrounded with sense; it rises in every l