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the other in his poems.
The unmanageable verses in
Milton are very few, and all of them occur in works printed after his blindness had lessened the chances of supervision and increased those of error.
There are only two, indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand.
These are,
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,
and
With them from bliss to the bottomless deep.
This certainly looks like a case where a word had dropped out or had been stricken out by some proof-reader who limited the number of syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his finger-ends.
Mr. Masson notices only the first of these lines, and says that to make it regular by accenting the word
bottomless on the second syllable would be ‘too horrible.’
Certainly not, if
Milton so accented it, any more than
blasphemous and twenty more which sound oddly to us now. However that may be,
Milton could not have intended to close not only a period, but a paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in the only other passage where the word occurs it is accented as now on the first syllable:
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell.
As
bottom is a word which, like
bosom and
besom, may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according to circumstances, I am persuaded that the last passage quoted (and all three refer to the same event) gives us the word wanting in the two others, and that
Milton wrote, or meant to write,—
Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit,
which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of ripple that
Milton liked best.
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