Among the poems that followed in the 1645 edition were the _Passion_, a failure which Milton recognized as a failure and abandoned, but yet, characteristically, did not refuse to publish; the _Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, which, still youthful as it is and is seen to be by the frigid and false antithesis of Queen and Marchioness with which it ends, has yet very beautiful lines-- "Gentle Lady, may thy grave Peace and quiet ever have! After this thy travail sore, Sweet rest seize thee evermore"; the famous lines on Shakspeare, contributed anonymously to the second Folio; and the noble outburst of heavenly music which begins-- "Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse." {104} This was written some years later; and even after _Paradise Lost_ it may rank as the most daring and entirely successful of Milton's long-sustained wheelings of musical flight. The stanza no longer provides him with space enough: and here his whole twenty-eight lines are one continuous strain, with no break in them and scarcely any pause, in ten-syllabled lines of boldly varied rhyme and accent. His task here is not so difficult as it was to be in _Paradise Lost_, for he has rhyme to provide him with variety and he admits two verses of six syllables among his twenty-eight; but already he is completely master of the possibilities of the ten-syllable line, and can make it yield as lavish a wealth of variety in unity as was later on to make the great passages of _Paradise Lost_ an eternal amazement to lovers and practisers of the art of verse. "Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ, Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce; And to our high-raised phantasy present That undisturbed song of pure concent." They are all the same line, and yet how different. It is difficult to believe that this is the same metre which Waller and Dryden {105} were soon, amid universal applause, to file down into the smooth monotony of-- "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide; Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?"