Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/138

 'He varies the verse,' says Professor Raleigh, 'till he has hardly a rule left, save the iambic pattern, which he treats merely as a point of departure and reference, a background or framework to carry the variations imposed upon it by the luxuriance of perfectly composed art.' The metre is like the canvas which shows through the pictures woven in tapestry. In some early blank verse the sentence is forced to conform to the music; while the later Elizabethans had taken such licences that the verse became indistinguishable from prose. When Milton, for the first time, applied blank verse to a great narrative poem, he entirely reformed this laxity and reached the perfect balance, in which the sentences and the line reciprocally strengthen each other. No one has ever equalled him in this. The 'secret is lost'—as Professor Raleigh puts it—or, rather, no later poet has possessed the delicate instinct which arranged Milton's words in their 'well-ordered files.' The 'secret' was never expressible in a formula. It means simply that Milton had a marvellous ear; but even if we could assign certain 'laws of verse' which he unconsciously obeyed, we should still be as far as ever from the power of applying them.

Milton is a master of the 'grand style' because