smouldering pile. The quiet cynicism of our everyday demeanour is
open and shameless, we callously anticipate objections founded on
the well-known vacuity of our seeming emotions, and assure our
friends that we are "truly" grieved or "sincerely" rejoiced at
their hap--as if joy or grief that really exists were some rare and
precious brand of joy or grief. In its trivial conversational uses
so simple and pure a thing as joy becomes a sandwich-man--humanity
degraded to an advertisement. The poor dejected word shuffles
along through the mud in the service of the sleek trader who
employs it, and not until it meets with a poet is it rehabilitated
and restored to dignity.

This is no indictment of society, which came into being before
literature, and, in all the distraction of its multifarious
concerns, can hardly keep a school for Style. It is rather a
demonstration of the necessity, amid the wealthy disorder of modern
civilisation, for poetic diction. One of the hardest of a poet's
tasks is the search for his vocabulary. Perhaps in some idyllic
pasture-land of Utopia there may have flourished a state where
division of labour was unknown, where community of ideas, as well
as of property, was absolute, and where the language of every day
ran clear into poetry without the need of a refining process. They
say that Caedmon was a cow-keeper: but the shepherds of Theocritus
and Virgil are figments of a courtly brain, and Wordsworth himself,
in his boldest flights of theory, was forced to allow of selection.
Even by selection from among the chaos of implements that are in
daily use around him, a poet can barely equip himself with a choice
of words sufficient for his needs; he must have recourse to his
predecessors; and so it comes about that the poetry of the modern
world is a store-house of obsolete diction. The most surprising