“------He soon
Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand,
The same whom John saw also in the sun: 
His back was turned, but not his brightness hid;
Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar
Circled his head, nor less his locks behind
Illustrious on his shoulders fledge with wings
Lay waving round; on some great charge employ’d
He seem’d, or fix’d in cogitation deep. 
Glad was the spirit impure, as now in hope
To find who might direct his wand’ring flight
To Paradise, the happy seat of man,
His journey’s end, and our beginning woe. 
But first he casts to change his proper shape,
Which else might work him danger or delay: 
And now a stripling cherub he appears,
Not of the prime, yet such as in his face
Youth smiled celestial, and to every limb
Suitable grace diffus’d, so well he feign’d: 
Under a coronet his flowing hair
In curls on either cheek play’d; wings he wore
Of many a colour’d plume sprinkled with gold,
His habit fit for speed succinct, and held
Before his decent steps a silver wand.”

The figures introduced here have all the elegance and precision of a Greek statue; glossy and impurpled, tinged with golden light, and musical as the strings of Memnon’s harp!

Again, nothing can be more magnificent than the portrait of Beelzebub: 

      “With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
      The weight of mightiest monarchies:” 

Or the comparison of Satan, as he “lay floating many a rood,” to “that sea beast,”

      “Leviathan, which God of all his works
      Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream!”

What a force of imagination is there in this last expression!  What an idea it conveys of the size of that hugest of created beings, as if it shrunk up the ocean to a stream, and took up the sea in its nostrils as a very little thing?  Force of style is one of Milton’s greatest excellences.  Hence, perhaps, he stimulates us more in the reading, and less afterwards.  The way to defend Milton against all impugners, is to take down the book and read it.

Milton’s blank verse is the only blank verse in the language (except Shakspeare’s) that deserves the name of verse.  Dr. Johnson, who had modelled his ideas of versification on the regular sing-song of Pope, condemns the Paradise Lost as harsh and unequal.  I shall not pretend to say that this is not sometimes the case; for where a degree of excellence beyond the mechanical rules of art is attempted, the poet must sometimes fail.  But I imagine that there are more perfect examples in Milton of musical expression, or of an adaptation of the sound and movement of the verse to the meaning of the passage, than in all our other writers, whether of rhyme or blank verse, put together, (with the exception already mentioned).  Spenser is the most harmonious of our stanza writers, as Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our rhymists.  But in neither is there any thing like the same ear for music, the same power of approximating the varieties of poetical to those of musical rhythm, as there is in our great epic poet.  The sound of his lines is moulded into the expression of the sentiment, almost of the very image.  They rise or fall, pause or hurry rapidly on, with exquisite art, but without the least trick or affectation, as the occasion seems to require.