_Lycidas_, which is to be reckoned as among the highest of Milton’s achievements, is something quite new in English poetry. In form it is pastoral, but this artificial medium serves only to show the power of Milton’s grip, which can wring from intractable material the very essence of poetry. The elegy has the color and music of the best Spenserian verse; but it has a climbing majesty of epithet and a dignified intensity of passion that Spenser does not possess. Its meter is an irregular stanza-sequence and rhyme-sequence of a peculiar haunting beauty. For, so to interpose a little ease, Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise; Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas Wash far away,--where’er thy bones are hurled, Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides Where thou perhaps, under the whelming tide, Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world; Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great Vision of the guarded mount Looks towards Namancos and Bayona’s hold.... (_b_) This period (1660–74) gives us the poetry of the matured Milton. The work of the middle years is composed of a few sonnets. These, with some others written at different times, sufficiently show Milton’s command of the Italian form, which he uses throughout. He gives it a sweep and sonorous impressiveness that set him alone beside Wordsworth, who in this respect is his poetical successor. The best of Milton’s sonnets are _On his Blindness_ and _On the Late Massacre in Piedmont_. The great work of this time is _Paradise Lost_. It was begun as early as 1658, and issued in 1667. At first it was divided into ten books or parts, but in the second edition it was redivided into twelve. In form it follows the strict unity of the classical epic; in theme it deals with the fall of man; but by means of introduced narratives it covers the rebellion of Lucifer in heaven, the celestial warfare, and the expulsion of the rebels. In conception the poem is spacious and commanding; it is sumptuously adorned with all the detail that Milton’s rich imagination, fed with classical and Biblical lore, can suggest; the characters, especially that of Lucifer, are drawn on a gigantic scale, and do not lack a certain tragic immensity; and the blank verse in which the work is composed is new and wonderful. This type of blank verse has founded a tradition in English; it has often been imitated and modified, but never paralleled. It lacks the suppleness of the Shakespearian measure; but it is instinct with beauty and scholarly care. It is almost infinite in modulation; varied cunningly in scansion, in pause, in cadence, and in sonorous dignity of music. It has its lapses into wordiness and bombast, but the lapses are few indeed. In the following extract the construction of the blank verse should be carefully observed. The variation of foot, pause, and melody is worthy of the closest study.