given him license to deal only in
persons, we are amply rewarded. His management of the poetic figure of
personification is superb. It is a figure difficult to handle, and
generally fails of effect through falling into one of two extremes.
Either the quality, or the person, is forgotten. The figures in the
_Romaunt of the Rose_ are good examples of the one type, of the minute
materialistic personifications of the Middle Ages, pictorial rather than
literary in essence, like the illuminated figures in a psalter. The
feeble abstractions that people Gray's Odes, where, as Coleridge
remarked, the personification depends wholly on the use of an initial
capital, are examples of the other. Neither has the art of combining the
vastness and vagueness of the abstract with the precise and definite
conception of a person, as is done in the great figure of Religion drawn
by Lucretius, as is done also in those other figures--the only creations
of English poetry which approach the Latin in grandeur--the horrible
phantoms of Sin and Death.

These, then, here outlined slightly and imperfectly, are some of the most
noteworthy features of Milton's style. By the measured roll of his verse,
and the artful distribution of stress and pause to avoid monotony and to
lift the successive lines in a climax; by the deliberate and choice
character of his diction, and his wealth of vaguely emotional epithets;
by the intuition which taught him to use no figures that do not heighten
the majesty, and no names that do not help the music of his poem; by the
vivid outlines of the concrete imaginations that he imposes on us for
real, and the cloudy brilliance that he weaves for them out of all great
historical memories, and all far-reaching abstract conceptions, he
attained to a finished style of perhaps a more consistent and unflagging
elevation than is to be found elsewhere in literature. There is nothing
to put beside him. "His natural port," says Johnson, "is gigantick
loftiness." And Landor: "After I have been reading the _Paradise Lost_, I
can take up no other poet with satisfaction. I seem to have left the
music of Handel for the music of the streets, or, at best, for drums and
fifes." The secret of the style is lost; and no poet, since Milton's day,
has recaptured the solemnity and beauty of the large utterance of
Gabriel, or Belial, or Satan.

The success of _Paradise Lost_, when it was published in 1667, was
immediate and startling. Some of the