at every step. Or, to take a passage in a very different key of feeling,
the same quality is seen in the description of the obedience of Eve:--

Required with gentle sway
And by her yielded, by him best received,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.

The slight stress and pause needed after each word, to render the full
meaning, produce, when the words are short as well as emphatic, a line of
terrific weight and impact. What more heartbreaking effect of weariness
and eternity of effort could be produced in a single line than this,
descriptive of the dolorous march of the fallen angels?--

O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death.

It would be difficult to match this line. In _The Tears of Peace_,
Chapman has a line (he repeats it in the _Tragedy of Biron_) which owes
some of its strength to the same cause. He describes the body as--

This glass of air, broken with less than breath,
This slave, bound face to face to death till death.

The eight stresses give the line a passionate energy.

All superfluous graces are usually discarded by Milton. He steers right
onward, and gives the reader no rest. A French critic of that age, who
has already been mentioned as the author of _Clovis_, praises Malherbe
and Voiture and the worthies of their time, at the expense of the
ancients. He calls Homer, especially, "a tattler, who is incessantly
repeating the same things in the same idle ridiculous epithets,--_the
swift-footed Achilles, the ox-eyed Juno, far-darting Apollo_." Milton
felt none of this contempt for Homer, but he discarded the practice. His
epithets are chosen to perform one exploit, and are dismissed when it is
accomplished. As with single epithets, so with lines and phrases; he does
not employ conventional repetitions either for their lyrical value or for
wafting the story on to the next point of interest. He seeks no effects
such as Marlowe obtained by the lyrical repetition of the line:--

To entertain divine Zenocrate.

He arrests the attention at every word; and when the thing is once said,
he has done with it.

In his _Discourse of Satire_ Dryden raises an interesting point. He makes
mention of "the beautiful turns of words and thoughts, which are as
requisite in this, as in heroick poetry itself, of which the satire is
undoubtedly a species." His attention, he says, was first