would fain get beyond generalities, and seek to detect the finer secret of Milton's power in the style which reflects his idiosyncrasy. Sometimes they investigate the mechanism of the versification and hope to learn something from minute examination of Milton's stresses and 'assonances' and alliterations. Professor Raleigh remarks that the passage describing the heavenward procession, in the seventh book, would 'justify an entire treatise.' A treatise would be amply justified if it could really reveal the secret of the music. Professor Raleigh appears, however, to admit that the prospect is a bad one; the 'laws of music in verse are very subtle … and, it must be added, very imperfectly ascertained.' Are they ascertained at all? Or, if ascertained, would they help us? There can, of course, be no doubt that a poet must have the musical power. Milton could not have produced his organ-tones on a 'scrannel pipe'; and a character of equal grandeur might have been combined with as little power of expression as was possessed by Cromwell. But a consideration of the instrument abstractedly, apart from the performer, can tell us little. It could only reveal that part of the charm of the poem which depends upon the sound, and which would
