treasury. It is this negative capability of words, their privative
force, whereby 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 "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 AEneas 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," "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