No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light by the force of a judicious obscurity, than Milton. His description of Death in the second book is admirably studied; it is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors... In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light by the force of a judicious obscurity, than Milton. His description of Death in the second book is admirably studied; it is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors... In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree." in the context of "Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; 2nd ed. 1759), pp. 100-101" to mean that wisdom is timeless.