A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men’s names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses. But I afterwards found that he had built them up out of a dry sentence in Marco Polo’s “Travels.” The wealth of Milton in this respect is wonderful. He subsidizes whole provinces of learning to spend their revenues upon one lavish sentence, and melts history, poetry, mythology, and philosophy together to make the rich Miltonic metal of a single verse. The first noticeable poem of Milton is his “Hymn of the Nativity,” and the long-enwoven harmony of the versification is what chiefly deserves attention in it. It is this which marks the advent of a new power into English poetry. In Spenser meaning and music are fused together; in Shakspeare the meaning dominates always (and I intend the sentiment as included in the word meaning); but in Milton the music is always a primary consideration. He is always as much musician as poet. And he is a harmonist, not a melodist. He loves great pomps and sequences of verse, and his first passages move like long processions, winding with sacred chant, and priestly robes rich with emblematic gold, and waving of holy banners, along the echoing aisles of some cathedral. Accordingly, no reader of Milton can fail to notice that he is fond of lists of proper names which can have only an acquired imaginative value, and in that way serve to excite our poetic sensibility, but which also are of deep musical significance. This was illustrated by reading various passages from “Paradise Lost.” Another striking peculiarity of Milton is the feeling of _spaciousness_ which his poetry gives us, and that not only in whole paragraphs, but even in single words. His mind was one which demanded illimitable room to turn in. His finest passages are those in which the imagination diffuses itself over a whole scene or landscape, or where it seems to circle like an eagle controlling with its eye broad sweeps of champaign and of sea, bathing itself in the blue streams of air, and seldom drawn earthward in the concentrated energy of its swoop. This shows itself unmistakably in the epithets of his earlier poems. In “Il Penseroso,” for example, where he hears The far-off curfew sound Over some _wide-watered_ shore Swinging slow with sullen roar; where he sees Gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall come sweeping by, or calls up the great bards who have sung Of forests and enchantments drear Where more is meant than meets the ear.