they can impress the minds with a sense of

vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence," that Burke celebrates in the fine treatise of his younger days. In such a phrase as as "the angel of the Lord" language mocks the positive rivalry of the pictorial art, which can offer only the poor pretence of an equivalent in a young man painted with wings. But the difference between the two arts is even better marked in the matter of negative suggestion; it is instanced by Burke from the noble passage where Virgil describes the descent of Æneas and the Sibyl to the shades of the nether world. Here are amassed all "the images of a tremendous dignity" that the poet could forge from the sublime of denial. The two most famous lines are a procession of negatives:

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram,
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.

Through hollow kingdoms, emptied of the day,
And dim, deserted courts where Dis bears sway,
Night-foundered, and uncertain of the path,
Darkling they took their solitary way.

Here is the secret of some of the cardinal

effects of literature; strong epithets like “lonely,” 66 supreme," "invisible," "eternal," "inexorable," with the substantives that belong to them, borrow their force from the vastness of what they deny. And not these alone, but many other words, less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend, bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework. Such words as "ominous," "fantastic," "attenuated," "bewildered," "justification," are atmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the soul with the passion - laden air that rises from humanity. It is precisely in his dealings with words like these, "heated originally by the breath of others,” that a poet's fine sense and knowledge most avail him. The company a word has kept, its history, faculties, and predilections, endear or discommend it to his instinct. How hardly will poetry consent to employ such words as "congratulation" or "philanthropist," -words of good origin, but tainted by long immersion in fraudulent rejoicings and pallid, comfortable, theoretic loves. How eagerly will the poetic imagination seize on a word

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like "control," which gives scope by its very vagueness, and is fettered by no partiality of association. All words, the weak and the strong, the definite and the vague, have their offices to perform in language, but the loftiest purposes of poetry are seldom served by those explicit hard words which, like tiresome explanatory persons, say all that they mean. Only in the focus and centre of man's knowledge is there place for the hammerblows of affirmation, the rest is a flickering world of hints and half-lights, echoes and suggestions, to be come at in the dusk or not at all.

The combination of these powers in words, of song and image and meaning, has given us the supreme passages of our romantic poetry. In Shakespeare's work, especially, the union of vivid definite presentment with immense reach of metaphysical suggestion seems to intertwine the roots of the universe with the particular fact; tempting the mind to explore that other side of the idea presented to it, the side turned away from it, and held by something behind.

The Weapons of Thought.

It will have blood; they say blood will have blood :
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have

By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret'st man of blood.

This meeting of concrete and abstract, of sense and thought, keeps the eye travelling along the utmost skyline of speculation, where the heavens are interfused with the earth. In short, the third and greatest virtue of words is no other than the virtue that belongs to the weapons of thought,— a deep, wide, questioning thought that discovers analogies and pierces behind things to a halfperceived unity of law and essence. In the employ of keen insight, high feeling, and deep thinking, language comes by its own; the prettinesses that may be imposed on a passive material are as nothing to the splendour and grace that transfigure even the meanest instrument when it is wielded by the energy of thinking purpose. The contempt that is cast, by the vulgar phrase, on "mere words" bears witness to the rarity of this serious consummation. Yet by words the world was shaped out of chaos, by words the

Christian religion was established among mankind. Are these terrific engines fit play-things for the idle humours of a sick child?

And now it begins to be apparent that no adequate description of the art of language can be drawn from the technical terminology of the other arts, which, like proud debtors, would gladly pledge their substance to repay an obligation that they cannot disclaim. Let one more attempt to supply literature with a parallel be quoted from the works of a writer on style, whose high merit it is that he never loses sight, either in theory or in practice, of the fundamental conditions proper to the craft of letters. Robert Louis Stevenson, pondering words long and lovingly, was impressed by their crabbed individuality, and sought to elucidate the laws of their arrangement by a reference to the principles of architecture. "The sister arts," he says, "enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen those blocks, dear to the nursery:

The Analogy

from Archi

tecture.