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 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 hammer-blows 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