One of the greatest charms of “Paradise Lost” is the incomparable metre, which, after Coleridge and Tennyson have done their utmost, remains without equal in our language for the combination of majesty and music.  It is true that this majesty is to a certain extent inherent in the subject, and that the poet who could rival it would scarcely be well advised to exert his power to the full unless his theme also rivalled the magnificence of Milton’s.  Milton, on his part, would have been quite content to have written such blank verse as Wordsworth’s “Yew Trees,” or as the exordium of “Alastor,” or as most of Coleridge’s idylls, had his subject been less than epical.  The organ-like solemnity of his verbal music is obtained partly by extreme attention to variety of pause, but chiefly, as Wordsworth told Klopstock, and as Mr. Addington Symonds points out more at length, by the period, not the individual line, being made the metrical unit, “so that each line in a period shall carry its proper burden of sound, but the burden shall be differently distributed in the successive verses.”  Hence lines which taken singly seem almost unmetrical, in combination with their associates appear indispensable parts of the general harmony.  Mr. Symonds gives some striking instances.  Milton’s versification is that of a learned poet, profound in thought and burdened with the further care of ordering his thoughts:  it is therefore only suited to sublimity of a solemn or meditative cast, and most unsuitable to render the unstudied sublimity of Homer.  Perhaps no passage is better adapted to display its dignity, complicated artifice, perpetual retarding movement, concerted harmony, and grave but ravishing sweetness than the description of the coming on of Night in the Fourth Book:—­

   “Now came still evening on, and twilight grey
    Had in her sober livery all things clad;
    Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
    They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
    Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
    She all night long her amorous descant sung;
    Silence was pleased:  now glowed the firmament
    With living sapphires; Hesperus that led
    The stary host rose brightest, till the moon,
    Rising in clouded majesty, at length
    Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light,
    And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.”

How exquisite the indication of the pauseless continuity of the nightingale’s song by the transition from short sentences, cut up by commas and semicolons, to the “linked sweetness long drawn out” of “She all night long her amorous descant sung”!  The poem is full of similar felicities, none perhaps more noteworthy than the sequence of monosyllables that paints the enormous bulk of the prostrate Satan:—­

    “So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay.”