One of the chief pocket-words was "Liberty." O Liberty! what verse is
committed in thy name! Or, to cite Madame Roland more accurately, O
Liberty, how have they "run" thee!

Who, it has been well asked by a citizen of a modern free country, is
thoroughly free except a fish? _Et encore_--even the "silent and
footless herds" may have more inter-accommodation than we are aware. But
in the pocket of the secondary poet how easy and how ready a word is
this, a word implying old and true heroisms, but significant here of an
excitable poet's economies. Yes, economies of thought and passion. This
poet, who is conspicuously the poet of excess, is in deeper truth the
poet of penury and defect.

And here is a pocket-word which might have astonished us had we not known
how little anyway it signified. It occurs in something customary about
Italy:

Hearest thou,
Italia? Tho' deaf sloth hath sealed thine ears,
The world has heard thy children--and God hears.

Was ever thought so pouched, so produced, so surely a handful of loot, as
the last thought of this verse?

What, finally, is his influence upon the language he has ransacked? A
temporary laying-waste, undoubtedly. That is, the contemporary use of
his vocabulary is spoilt, his beautiful words are wasted, spent,
squandered, _gaspilles_. The contemporary use--I will not say the future
use, for no critic should prophesy. But the past he has not been able to
violate. He has had no power to rob of their freshness the sixteenth-