But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

We agreed that these were good lines, with the accent of poetry: but we
allowed it to be a highly exalted way of telling how So-and-so climbed a
hill for a better view but found none. Now obviously this exaltation does
not arise immediately out of the action described (which is as ordinary
as it well could be), but is _derivative_. It borrows its wings, its
impetus, from a previous high moment, from the emotion proper to that
moment, from the speech proper to that emotion: and these sustain us
across to the next height as with the glide of an aeroplane. Your own
sense will tell you at once that the passage would be merely bombastic if
the poet were starting to set forth how So-and-so climbed a hill for the
view--just that, and nothing else: as your own sense tells you that the
swoop is from one height to another. For if bathos lay ahead, if Milton
had but to relate how the Duke of York, with twenty thousand men,
'marched up a hill and then marched down again,' he certainly would not
use diction such as:--

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared.

Even as it is, I think we must all detect a certain artificiality in the
passage, and confess to some relief when Satan is introduced to us, ten
lines lower down, to revivify the story. For let us note that, in the
nature of things, the more adorned and involved our style (and Milton's
is both ornate and involved) the more difficulty we must find with these
flat pedestrian intervals. Milton may 'bring it off,' largely through
knowing how to dodge the interval and contrive that it shall at any rate
be brief: but, as Bagehot noted, when we come to Tennyson and find
Tennyson in "Enoch Arden" informing us of a fish-jowter, that:--