Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds;
Where, through the sacred rays of chastity,
No savage fierce, bandit, or mountaineer
Will dare to soil her virgin purity.

Yea, there where very desolation dwells,
By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades,
She may pass on with unblenched majesty,
Be it not done in pride or in presumption.
Some say no evil thing that walks by night,
In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen,
Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost,
That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
No goblin or swart faëry of the mine,

Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity.

After the writing of Comus, some twenty years elapsed before Milton wrote his later poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, all of which are in blank verse. In these twenty years of service in the Puritan cause, Milton became almost a different man. After the Restoration in 1660, blind, poor, outcast, he sat down to write the great epic of Puritanism, Paradise Lost. His later poems lack the airy charm, the lightness, the grace of Comus and L'Allegro; but they possess a sublimity and a sonorous eloquence unequaled in British poetry. Milton's later blank verse does not greatly resemble that of Shakespeare, for narrative poetry calls for a different use of the metrical form. Milton himself explains his conception of the measure. "True musical delight," says he, "consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings." In the following description of Satan, Milton varies his pauses with masterly skill:

He, above the rest

In shape and gesture proudly eminent,
Stood like a tower; his form had not yet lost
All its original brightness; nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun, new risen,
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon,
In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs. Darkened so, yet shone
Above them all the archangel; but his face
Deep scars of thunder had entrenched; and care
Sat on his faded cheek; but under brows

Of dauntless courage, and considerate pride
Waiting revenge.

Since the time of Shakespeare and Milton, blank verse has been much used in reflective and descriptive poetry. Although Wordsworth wrote much very poor blank verse, no poet since Milton has handled the measure with greater skill. Wordsworth is preeminently a nature poet; no one has ever described natural phenomena with greater accuracy or finer insight. The following selection is from The Prelude, an autobiography of his boyhood and youth, which emphasizes those early influences which made him a poet. The reader should note the skill with which the poet manages to suggest, by the movement of his lines, the various motions and sounds of the skaters.

And in the frosty season, when the sun

Was set, and visible for many a mile

The cottage windows blazed through twilight gloom,
I heeded not their summons: happy time

It was indeed for all of us-for me

It was a time of rapture!

Clear and loud

The village clock tolled six,-I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse

That cares not for his home. All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase

And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound

Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively

Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star

That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain; and oftentimes,
When we had given our bodies to the wind,

And all the shadowy banks on either side

Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,

Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs

Wheeled by me-even as if the earth had rolled

With visible motion her diurnal round!

Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched

Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

Although all of the Romantic poets, except Scott, used blank verse with great effectiveness, none of Wordsworth's

contemporaries handled the measure with greater skill than Keats displayed in his fragmentary epic, Hyperion. This story of the fallen Grecian gods who reigned before Jupiter opens as follows:

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head

Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day

Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity

Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.

"There," says Professor Lowes, "if it ever was secured, is absolute truth of illusion, and flawless consistency of the imagery that creates it."

Walter Savage Landor, of whom we shall have more to say in the chapter on Light Verse, links the Romantic and Victorian poets. Although born in 1775, he lived to know and admire Robert Browning. The following poem contains a vivid and accurate characterization of Browning, who, like Landor, was then living in Italy. The number of poets, novelists, and dramatists who have found inspiration in Italy is very great. A visit to Italy or a residence there plays a large part in the lives of Chaucer, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Landor, the Brownings, Goethe, Lamartine, Ibsen, Hawthorne, Cooper, Howells, Samuel

Butler the novelist, and Henry James. The last line of Landor's poem contains an allusion to Mrs. Browning.

TO ROBERT BROWNING

There is delight in singing, tho' none hear
Beside the singer; and there is delight
In praising, tho' the praiser sit alone
And see the prais'd far off him, far above.
Shakespeare is not our poet, but the world's,
Therefore on him no speech! and brief for thee,
Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale,
No man hath walked along our roads with steps
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue

So varied in discourse. But warmer climes
Give brighter plumage, stronger wing: the breeze
Of Alpine heights thou playest with, borne on
Beyond Sorrento and Amalfi, where

The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)

Browning himself used blank verse very effectively in a number of his best poems and plays. His blank verse is essentially dramatic and conversational. Unfortunately, such poems as "Fra Lippo Lippi" and “Andrea del Sarto" are too long to quote here. So also are the blank verse poems of another great Victorian, Matthew Arnold, who uses the measure in "Balder Dead" and "Sohrab and Rustum."

son.

No Victorian poet wrote better blank verse than TennyHis later poems, however, are usually regarded as inferior to those included in the 1842 volume which gave him his reputation. "Morte D'Arthur" probably marks the high-water mark of his poetry. The blank verse of the later Idylls of the King is more monotonous and