or when Keats casually drops us such a line as

The journey homeward to habitual self,

or, to come down to our own times and to a living poet, when I open on a
page of William Watson and read

O ancient streams, O far descended woods,
Full of the fluttering of melodious souls!...

'why then (will say the initiated one), why worry me with any definition
of the Grand Style in English, when here, and here, and again here--in
all these lines, simple or intense or exquisite or solemn--I recognise
and feel the _thing_?'

Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie just here.
Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be
applied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal
persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive.

(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with me to Plato's
wayfarers, whom we have left so long under the cypresses; and loth as we
must be to lay hands on our father Parmenides, I feel we must treat the
gifted Athenian stranger to a little manhandling. For did you not
observe--though Greek was a living language and to his metropolitan mind
the only language--how envious he showed himself to seal up the well, or
allow it to trickle only under permit of a public analyst: to treat all
innovation as suspect, even as, a hundred odd years ago, the Lyrical
Ballads were suspect?