File:Bust of John Milton, about 1654.jpg

Identifier: scribnersmagazin16newy (find matches)
Title: Scribner's magazine
Year: 1887 (1880s)
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Publisher: New York : C. Scribner's Sons
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Toronto

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HELF OF OLD BOOKS 339 As a master of harmonyand of easily maintainedelevation, in English blankverse, writes Lowell, Mil-ton has no rival. He was (versed, he first wrote)skilled in many tonguesand many literatures ; hehad weighed the value ofwords, whether for soundor sense, or w^here the twomay be of mutual help.He, surely, if any, was whathe calls a mint-master oflanguage. He must haveknown, if any ever knew,that even in the sermo pe-des tr is there are yet greatdifferences in gait, thatprose is governed by lawsof modulation as exact, ifnot so exacting, as thoseof verse, and that it mayconjure with words as pre-vailingly. The music issecreted in it, yet oftenmore potent in suggestionthan that of any versewhich is not of utmost mas-tery. We hearken after itas to a choir in the side-chapel of some cathedral,heard faintly and fitfully across the long desert of the nave, now Milton for the first time. Milton livedpursuing and overtaking the cadences, largely in a world of disesteem, and
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Bust of Milton, about 1654. (From a photograph of the only mould of the original cast from life, preservedin Trinity College Library, Cambridge, England. By kind permission ofthe Master and Fellows of Trinity.) onh to have them grow doubtful againand elude the ear before it has ceasedto throb with them. . . . Milton isnot so truly a writer of great prose as agreat man w^riting in prose, and it is had grown somewhat hardy perhaps inthe cold winds which brought him nofruit of approval from the harvests ofthe world. He wrote his prose with astinging pen, and when music from really Milton w^e seek there more than upper airs came to him for transmission anything else. Therefore because we in verse he took no counsel from the seek Milton we value the early editions nether sphere as to form or doctrine, of his works which are upon the shelf His first appearance in letters was in of old books. Dryden is said to haveremarked, w^hen the first edition ofParadise Lost met his eye: Theman cuts us

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