Mastery of Verse.--Milton's verse, especially in _Paradise Lost_, is such a symphony of combined rhythm, poetic expression, and thought; it is so harmonious, so varied, and yet so apparently simple in its complexity, that it has never been surpassed in kind. His mastery of rhythm is not so evident in a single line as in a group of lines. The first sentence in _Paradise Lost_ contains sixteen lines, and yet the rhythm, the pauses, and the thought are so combined as to make oral reading easy and the meaning apparent. The conception of the music of the spheres in their complex orbits finds some analogy in the harmony of the combined rhythmical units of his verse. Denied the use of his eyes as a guide to the form of his later verse, he must have repeated aloud these groups of lines and changed them until their cadence satisfied his remarkably musical ear. Lines like these show the melody of which this verse is capable:-- "Heaven opened wide Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound On golden hinges moving."[5] To begin with, he had, like Shakespeare and Keats an instinctive feeling for the poetic value of words and phrases. Milton's early poems abound in such poetic expressions as "the frolic wind," "the slumbring morn," "linkèd sweetness," "looks commercing with the skies," "dewy-feathered sleep," "the studious cloister's pale," "a dim religious light," the "silver lining" of the cloud, "west winds with musky wing," "the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." His poetic instinct enabled him to take common prosaic words and, by merely changing the position of the adjective, transmute them into imperishable verse. His "darkness visible" and "human face divine" are instances of this power. [Illustration: MILTON DICTATING PARADISE LOST TO HIS DAUGHTERS. _From the painting by Munkacsy_.] Twentieth century criticism is more fully recognizing the debt of subsequent poetic literature to Milton. Saintsbury writes:-- "Milton's influence is omnipresent in almost all later English poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his successors."[6] How the Paradise Lost has affected Thought.--Few people realize how profoundly this poem has influenced men's ideas of the hereafter. The conception of hell for a long time current was influenced by those pictures which Milton painted with darkness for his canvas and the lightning for his brush. Our pictures of Eden and of heaven have also felt his touch. Theology has often looked through Milton's imagination at the fall of the rebel angels and of man. Huxley says that the cosmogony which stubbornly resists the conclusions of science, is due rather to the account in _Paradise Lost_ than to _Genesis_. Many of Milton's expressions have become crystallized in modern thought. Among such we may mention:--