But now my oat proceeds, And listens to the Herald of the Sea. The syntax of the thought is sufficiently lucid and orderly, but it is compressed into too few words. In the Fifth Book of _Paradise Lost_ is described how-- The Eternal Eye, whose sight discerns Abtrusest thoughts, from forth his holy mount, And from within the golden lamps that burn Nightly before him, saw without their light Rebellion rising--saw in whom, how spread Among the Sons of Morn, what multitudes Were banded to oppose his high decree; And, smiling, to his only Son thus said. Here, it is true, "the Eternal Eye" smiles and speaks to his only Son. But Milton has really discarded the figure after the words "his high decree," which bring in a new order of thoughts. He trusts the reader to follow his thought without grammatical readjustment--to drop the symbol and remember only the thing symbolised. His trust was warranted, until Landor detected the solecism. The clearest case of mixed metaphor ever charged against Milton occurs in the Eleventh Book, where the lazar-house is described-- Sight so deform what heart of rock could long Dry-eyed behold? Rogers pointed this out to Coleridge, who told Wordsworth that he could not sleep all the next night for thinking of it. What months of insomnia must he not have suffered from the perusal of Shakespeare's works! The close-wrought style of Milton makes the reading of _Paradise Lost_ a hard task in this sense, that it is a severe intellectual exercise, without relaxation. The attention that it demands, word by word, and line by line, could not profitably be given to most books; so that many readers, trained by a long course of novel-reading to nibble and browse through the pastures of literature, find that Milton yields little or no delight under their treatment, and abandon him in despair.