if it had itself wings. Milton has himself given us the theory of his
versification--

"Such as the meeting soul may pierce
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out."

Dr. Johnson and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a
rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton's,--Thomson's,
Young's, Cowper's, Wordsworth's,--and it will be found, from the want
of the same insight into "the hidden soul of harmony," to be mere
lumbering prose.

To proceed to a consideration of the merits of Paradise Lost, in the
most essential point of view, I mean as to the poetry of character and
passion. I shall say nothing of the fable, or of other technical
objections or excellences; but I shall try to explain at once the
foundation of the interest belonging to the poem. I am ready to give up
the dialogues in Heaven, where, as Pope justly observes, "God the Father
turns a school-divine"; nor do I consider the battle of the angels as
the climax of sublimity, or the most successful effort of Milton's pen.
In a word, the interest of the poem arises from the daring ambition and
fierce passions of Satan, and from the account of the paradisaical
happiness, and the loss of it by our first parents. Three-fourths of the
work are taken up with these characters, and nearly all that relates to
them is unmixed sublimity and beauty. The two first books alone are like
two massy pillars of solid gold.

Satan is the most heroic subject that ever was chosen for a poem; and
the execution is as perfect as the design is lofty. He was the first of